So I know that its VMWare, so the fees will be eyewatering, but 85% reduction is really meaningless in this story.

How much was Tottenham using? Did the 85% actually cover the cost of their new CTO coming in and switching platforms?

It's very vague.

Yeah it means nothing without details. They're a new HPE customer so they might be getting a discount the first year or something.

A friend of mine is a virtualization SME and from what I can tell you don't really save that much on the alternatives. Also, HPE sell VMware. HPE has a modular solution where you can pick the hypervisor you want to use, including VMware.

At my $dayjob we use Proxmox and it's good enough. I think Proxmox would be good enough for most orgs.

But my friend works with the tax agency and they definitely make use of vSAN, NSX, and all those nice features that puts VMware above the competition.