Customer Success Stories

Inetum implements HPE Morpheus VM Essentials for the City of Bruges

Future-proof virtualization: equal capabilities, significantly lower cost

What do you do when a supplier suddenly changes the rules of the game and multiplies its prices? For the City of Bruges, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware was the signal to move away from a long-standing trusted partner. Inetum stepped in as a trusted advisor and delivered a pragmatic, cost-effective alternative through HPE VM Essentials (VME), without compromising performance or business continuity.

Published: 04/09/2026

Need for future-proof vrtualization

Since late 2023, the virtualization market has undergone a major transformation. That is when Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware. Since then, organizations worldwide have faced drastic changes to licensing models and sharply rising costs. The City of Bruges was no exception. Having relied on VMware for many years with satisfaction, the city found that renewing its licenses was no longer financially viable within available budgets.

“We were faced with a fundamental decision,” recalls Infrastructure IT Director Ollivier Francq. “Our technical teams had always been very satisfied with VMware, but the commercial reality forced us to act. Licensing costs first tripled, then quadrupled again. In the end, our costs increased twelvefold compared to our previous situation. If we had followed that path, we would have had to make significant cuts elsewhere, for example in compute or storage. We would have received less value for more money. That simply wasn’t an option.”

A Budgetary No-Brainer

The search for an alternative was also driven by the city’s need to do more with less. Within that context, VMware’s price increases were impossible to justify. The City of Bruges evaluated several virtualization alternatives but was not immediately convinced. Most options involved complex migrations or lacked credible support. The solution ultimately came from an unexpected direction. Inetum proposed a complete transition to an HPE environment, including the new HPE VM Essentials hypervisor.

“Looking back, it was really a no-brainer,” says Ollivier Francq. “By choosing an integrated HPE package that included servers, storage, and the virtualization layer, we were able to acquire twice as many resources for the same investment compared to competing solutions.”

The City of Bruges secured maintenance agreements and pricing for a period of seven years. “That gives us budget certainty in a highly unpredictable market. Moving to HPE effectively provides insurance against future price increases.”

The Power of an Open Platform

Beyond the immediate cost savings, the migration to HPE VM Essentials also delivered a strategic advantage: avoiding a new form of vendor lock-in. VME is built on KVM open-source technology. While many platforms seek to keep customers within their own ecosystem, the City of Bruges deliberately chose a more open architecture.

“HPE VM Essentials gives us a platform that makes cloud integration much easier,” explains Ollivier Francq. “For example, we are looking at HPE Morpheus as a management platform for both cloud and virtualization, enabling us to manage our environment in an open and future-proof way. Whether we want to run workloads on-premises or migrate them to one or multiple cloud environments, we remain in control. That flexibility is essential for a modern government organization that wants to stay agile.”

Ensuring Business Continuity

With any major infrastructure migration, the greatest concern is disruption to services. For a city like Bruges, where systems must be available around the clock for employees, citizens, and businesses, a seamless transition was an absolute requirement. Although support for the existing VMware environment remains in place until October 2027, the city did not want to wait until the last minute to make the move.

Inetum is currently guiding the City of Bruges through the deployment of the new environment. “The migration of the servers and storage infrastructure has already been completed, with business continuity as the top priority.”

The greatest compliment the IT department could receive is that no one has noticed the migration so far. “In the worst-case scenario, a server may be unavailable for a minute, but in many cases it’s just a few lost pings before the environment is fully up and running again.”

Trust in Expertise

Choosing a relatively new player in the hypervisor landscape requires confidence, but also the right guidance. For the City of Bruges, its long-standing partnership with Inetum played a decisive role.

“Inetum knows our way of working inside and out. For over twenty years, we have worked closely with Inetum specialists whom we consider true trusted advisors, an extension of our own IT department. When Inetum tells us it believes in a technology and is willing to stand behind it with support services, that gives us real peace of mind.”

For the City of Bruges, the project was about more than simply purchasing hardware and software. “There is also the reassurance that experienced people are there to help you through challenging moments. That combination of HPE’s strong technology and Inetum’s local expertise gave us the confidence to take this step.”

challenging the status quo

By moving away from VMware, the City of Bruges has demonstrated that a fixed budget does not have to limit technological innovation. On the contrary, by challenging the status quo, the city achieved approximately 30% savings on its overall budget while nearly doubling the capacity of its new solution.

“It forces you to make sharper choices,” concludes Ollivier Francq. “By investing now in a well-designed, open architecture, we are ready for the years ahead. We have a high-performance environment that costs less, is easier to manage, and gives us the freedom to move more easily between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud in the future.”