Interviews

Key Trends and Shifts in the Java Landscape: Insights from Azul’s Oracle Java Usage, Pricing & Migration Survey

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Simon Ritter, Deputy CTO at Azul

 

Can you elaborate on the key findings of Azul’s recent Oracle Java Usage, Pricing & Migration Survey? What trends stood out to you the most?

There were several insights we found in conducting this report, but a few of the key findings include that 86% of respondents were in the process of, were planning to, or had already migrated completely off Oracle Java. In addition, 2/3 were planning to start their migrations within two years.

Further insights were that while perceptions remain regarding the length of time and complexity involved in migrating off Oracle, 75% of organizations completed their migrations to OpenJDK within 12 months, and 23% within 3 months. 84% of respondents also indicated that the migration was easier than expected or as expected.

 

With 86% of Oracle Java users migrating off the platform, what do you think is driving this significant shift? How has Azul positioned itself to capture this market?

The biggest driver for companies was cost (53%). Oracle’s changes to its Java pricing policy, which they announced on January 23 (the latest of four different pricing and licensing changes over the last four to five years), had ripple effects across the industry. Oracle Java SE went from a per-instance pricing plan to an employee-based pricing plan. This has meant that many companies are seeing price increases of anywhere from 2x – 10x over what they were previously paying.

From Azul, customers receive an identical JDK to Oracle Java, for about 70% less. We are focused on providing an identical, if not better, service to Oracle. In addition, we provide both regularly scheduled security updates and full updates four times a year (same as Oracle). Azul is also the only Java vendor to provide support for older versions of Java, Java 6 and 7, both of which are still widespread across organizations.

 

Given the concerns around Oracle’s pricing and audit risks, how does Azul’s pricing model and support structure address these issues for your customers?

We price based on the number of cores being used to run service side applications, with no multipliers. This aligns with the company’s actual usage of Java as compared to Oracle’s employee-based pricing which is based on the size of the company regardless of if they use a single instance of Java or thousands of applications. The net-net is that we are about 70% less than Oracle Java with as good if not better of a commercial support offering.

 

How do you see the future of Java evolving, especially with the increasing preference for open-source distributions like OpenJDK?

We are already seeing the shift away from Oracle as a proprietary JDK to open-source distributions, and I would expect that to continue in the future as more companies are faced with potential price increases associated with using Oracle Java. They will be looking for an alternative which delivers the same levels of service but at a much lower price.

 

The survey indicated that Java users are looking for more cost-effective and open solutions. How is Azul’s JVM product lineup evolving to meet these changing demands in the Java community?

In terms of the approach to being cost effective, Azul is ensuring that we can deliver the same levels of service at a much lower price – this is our Platform Core product. Our product line-up continues to evolve to meet the changing demands of the Java community. For example, we understand that as organizations shift workloads to the cloud, they are not always realizing the cost savings/benefits which was one of the main drivers to move their applications to the cloud in the first place. With Azul Platform Prime, our enhanced JDK, we provide enterprises with lower latency and higher throughput, so that they can run the same carrying capacity, but with fewer cloud resources which leads to cost savings of around 20%. Azul’s Platform Core and Prime products are available via Amazon Marketplace for AWS customers.

 

In your role on the JCP Executive Committee and the OpenJDK Vulnerability Group, how do you see these industry standards and security measures impacting the adoption of OpenJDK across enterprises globally?

With regard to the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee – Java is different to Linux for example, even though they are both open-source projects, because Java has a formal standard associated with it. The benefit to Java users is that we can demonstrate that we conform to the standards based on what’s called the Java Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). That’s a set of tests that you use to verify conformance with the standard, up to 150,000 tests, which gives users a very high level of confidence if you are moving from one TCK tested distribution of OpenJDK to another TCK tested distribution, that your apps will run in a functionally identical way. So you don’t have to worry about migrating, you don’t have to worry about changing or recompiling your code to move from one distribution to the other.

This ease of migration, thanks to a formal, testable standard, combined with the community-driven development of security patches, ensures that OpenJDK distributions can be widely adopted and used as a cost-effective alternative to Oracle Java. For companies that want to demystify Java migration, I’ve shared the process and methodology we’ve implemented with over 500 customers in OpenJDK for Dummies.