Topgolf has migrated 12,000 virtual machines from VMware to VergeIO's VergeOS platform, saving more than $11.3 million and avoiding a projected 400 percent increase in licensing costs following Broadcom's acquisition and product reconfiguration.
Broadcom's decision to eliminate perpetual VMware licenses and bundle offerings into fewer, costlier tiers triggered a wave of customer departures. For Topgolf—which operates over 100 venues globally with interactive golf simulations and real-time shot tracking—the economics were stark: continue paying escalating fees or rebuild its infrastructure stack.
Scott Forehand, Topgolf's global infrastructure manager, said the company's VMware footprint "ran very deep." Topgolf had standardized on vSphere and ESXi for years and deployed VxRail, a hyperconverged platform co-developed by VMware and Dell, starting in 2017. The migration was not trivial—Topgolf employees sat on VMware user groups and had been featured in case studies touting the deployment.
Topgolf selected VergeOS chiefly for its multi-tenancy architecture, which lets the company manage compute, storage, disaster recovery, and networking from a single pane across its distributed footprint—venues, offices, labs, and data centers. Forehand said the comparative economics are now "even greater" when priced against a new VxRail deployment.
Twenty Topgolf venues still run VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundation. Forehand expects full migration by mid-December.
The move reflects a broader pattern. VergeIO reports acquiring roughly 70 new customers each quarter, most fleeing VMware. George Crump, VergeIO's chief marketing officer, said typical defectors face imminent license renewals, need hardware refreshes, operate multi-site environments, or require true multi-tenancy—a feature VMware's licensing model does not subsidize. Most customers bundle the migration with hardware replacement or broader infrastructure modernization, which Crump identified as the primary operational friction point.
For Topgolf, the $11.3 million savings reflects its scale. Smaller organizations migrating from VMware typically see meaningful reductions in software costs and eliminate separate tools for data protection, replication, and multi-site orchestration—economics that matter most to organizations already carrying the overhead of distributed infrastructure.
