LSEG extends VMware deal as NHS board exits for Nutanix

Two organizations made opposite decisions about VMware this week, and together they illustrate exactly where the enterprise market stands two years after Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition reshaped the licensing landscape in ways nobody outside Broadcom particularly welcomed.

The London Stock Exchange Group renewed its VMware contract for five more years, extending a relationship that stretches back more than a decade. Under the new agreement, Broadcom will provide professional services to help LSEG roll out VMware Cloud Foundation 9 across its environments. For an organization running critical market infrastructure where reliability is not negotiable, continuity with a proven platform carries real weight, regardless of what licensing costs look like elsewhere in the market.

LSEG operates a hybrid multi-cloud environment that also includes Dell Technologies for on-premises infrastructure, AWS for cloud workloads, and Microsoft through a 10-year partnership that began when Microsoft acquired a stake in the group back in 2022. Adding VMware Cloud Foundation 9 into that mix gives LSEG a private cloud layer it can evolve alongside those other relationships rather than replacing any of them outright.

Meanwhile, NHS North East London Integrated Care Board reached the opposite conclusion. The board migrated away from a legacy VMware and NetApp environment, moving instead to a Nutanix-based private cloud platform across two data centers. In doing so, it cut its storage footprint from 22 NetApp nodes down to eight Nutanix nodes, reduced costs, and simplified day-to-day administration considerably.

Phil Cook, the board’s senior infrastructure manager, described the previous environment as a nightmare to manage. He also noted something pointed: Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the pricing changes that followed actually validated the decision to migrate, because it confirmed the board had already moved in the right direction before costs climbed further.

That dynamic is playing out across the industry in different ways. Larger enterprises with deep VMware dependencies and the leverage to negotiate tend to renew, often because migration risk outweighs licensing discomfort at scale. Smaller organizations with more straightforward environments tend to find the exit easier to justify, and increasingly, more financially compelling.

CISPE filed a second antitrust complaint against Broadcom in March 2026. The organization argued that pricing changes since the acquisition had pushed costs up by more than tenfold across affected customers.