Azul: Rising Costs Forcing Oracle Java Customers to Seek Alternatives

Rising costs are pushing Oracle Java customers to look at alternative solutions, according to James Johnston, VP EMEA at Java specialist, Azul.

Sunnyvale, California-based Azul saw a 95% increase in new bookings in EMEA for the first half of its fiscal year 2025. The growth is from organizations reacting to Oracle Java’s ongoing price hikes and face rising cloud infrastructure costs, it said.

Changes to Java licensing last year reportedly saw many organizations having to pay two to five times as much as they did previously.

“Customers tell us Oracle Java’s ongoing price hikes and rising cloud infrastructure costs have become a major challenge in the last year,” said Johnston. “As a result of Oracle’s move to a subscription model where companies are charged for the total number of employees in their organizations, not the number using Oracle Java, companies around the world are telling us they are seeing anywhere between a two-times and 12-times increase in prices for what they previously paid Oracle.”

Azul's James Johnston

Johnston said partners find that deploying Azul Platform Core is an attractive proposition, as a drop-in replacement for Oracle Java, at typically a 70% cost reduction.

“Similarly, using Azul Platform Prime, partners are able to typically show customers[more than] a 20% decrease in their cloud and infrastructure costs,” he said.

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He added they can also reach performance gains of 37% across their business-critical Java applications.

Azul’s Channel Expansion

Over the last year, Azul’s channel expansion gained traction globally with 15 new strategic partnerships. These include key distributors in Australia, the Middle East, South Africa and India. Azul also expanded its own presence in Paris to oversee partnerships in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

In addition to its new bookings, Azul increased its new customer logos by 21% year-over-year in the first half of its 2025 fiscal year. Channel partners contributed 71% of the new business growth in EMEA in the first half of the fiscal year, including all business sourced, influenced or fulfilled by channel partners.

The U.K., Sweden and Germany emerged as Azul’s top three markets in EMEA during the first half of the fiscal year. The banking and finance sector was a standout, with a 195% year-over-year increase in the first half of the fiscal year.

We asked Oracle about Azul's claims but hadn't heard back by publication time.