The Azul 2025 State of Java report (registration required) is out. It shows that enterprises are abandoning Oracle Java in droves. 88% of respondents are hotfooting it elsewhere due to cost, licensing, restrictive policies, and the sales tactics of Oracle staff.
Oracle has also faced an increase in the number of open-source competitors in the Java space. It allows enterprises to better focus their Java budget on affordable support. With flexibility and transparency also high on the reasons for moving, enterprises are showing that they no longer want to be locked in.
Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO at Azul, said, “Our report shows organizations are actively seeking ways to optimize their Java deployments to drive operational efficiency and cost predictability.
“As Java continues to be the backbone for business-critical applications in the enterprise, we’re seeing important trends — from the growing interest in Oracle Java alternatives to cloud optimization strategies, improvements in DevOps productivity, and innovation with AI.”
Hitting Oracle where it hurts
While this shift is not new, it is a blow to Oracle’s dominance in that enterprise application developer space. For other providers, it demonstrates that enterprises can be persuaded to move if the alternative makes sense.
The report drew on the experience of 2,039 respondents from six continents. All have direct or managerial responsibility for Java. The US (46%) and Europe (35%) made up the bulk of participants. 15% employ under 1,000 staff, 52% employ 1,001-5,000 and 16% employ 5,001-10,000. Importantly, 11% employ over 10,000 people.
These numbers show how heavily Java is used, which would also explain the pushback on licensing and cost. Interestingly, 29% are software vendors, and 15% are in financial services. The second category is a major user of Java, with over half of all core applications using it.
However, it is not just financial services that use Java heavily. 68% of respondents said that more than 50% of their applications are either built with Java or run on a JVM. If those customers dump Oracle, it will derail its earnings projections for the next few years.
Oracle has been the victim of its own avarice. In 2023, it said that a single Java application in an organisation would mean you needed licences for every employee, even if they don’t access Java. It also doubled technical support fees from 4% to 8% annually.
All this has led to 88% of companies looking to migrate off of Oracle Java, up from 66% in 2023. Almost half of those planning to migrate are targeting an OpenJDK release with paid support. Such a move makes sense. They will need assistance in carrying out the migration and ensuring that apps continue to run.
Support a critical factor in choosing a Java supplier
The report shows that 85% of organisations pay for Java support, up from 66% in 2023. That is a significant jump and shows the reliance they have on Java.
Many organisations are running older versions of Java where there is a critical need for patches, especially around security. While several vendors provide vulnerability patches, Azul says that only two companies provide Critical Patch Updates (CPUs), Oracle and itself.
What makes CPUs important is that recent larger Patch Set Updates (PSUs) have introduced new regression issues. These take weeks to resolve, causing disruption to businesses.
But what about those who don’t want to pay for commercial support? According to the report, 21% put this down to cost, 31% say it isn’t a priority, and 52% say they don’t need it. It’s worth noting that all these numbers are down from the 2023 version of this report, except for cost. That is up 3%.
What is not clear is which regions and industries those companies are in. IT resilience is top of mind for regulators, especially in Europe. It would be interesting to see what the risk analysis was. Pitting support costs and zero support against the size of a potential regulatory fine is an interesting approach.
Interestingly, the report was conducted just before Oracle decided to end free support for Java 17. According to the report, “Those participants [using Java 17] have either decided to pay Oracle for continued use and support, upgrade to Java 21, replace Java with another programming language, or migrate to another JDK distribution/provider. 55% of Oracle Java 17 users say they are very or extremely concerned, compared to 42% overall.”
Cloud overprovision is a serious cost issue
The report also calls out the problem that overprovisioning in the cloud has in terms of Java-associated costs. It says, “nearly two-thirds of organizations using Java in the cloud report that over 50% of their cloud compute costs stem from Java.”
With 71% of respondents admitting that 20% of the cloud compute capacity sitting idle, is there room for savings through better optimisation? The answer is complicated. Much depends on how your cloud capacity is configured. For example, if you are running an active-active failover, you must fully license both sides. In an asynchronous model, there are savings to be made.
Azul discovered that customers are beginning to be proactive in reducing overspending on the cloud. Among the steps respondents are taking are:
- 38% have implemented new internal rules for using cloud instances, including 25% who say that they have already established a FinOps function.
- 35% of organizations are using newer, more efficient compute instances and processors, supporting the trend to use AWS Graviton and ARM processors for efficiency and speed.
- 24% of survey respondents use a high-performance JDK to enhance application performance, reduce costs, and boost efficiency.
While the report also looked at DevOps, it didn’t address the wastage caused by developers overprovisioning cloud services. This often happens as part of DevTest processes, and organisations lose sight of what has been set up. Development teams must be cost-aware and have processes to reduce unused or unwanted resources.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This report covers much more ground than the above, making it interesting reading. However, it lacks detail on some of the results and suggestions for how organisations can further reduce costs.
For Oracle, this is disappointing and worrying, as it directly impacts where they have told analysts future revenue will come from. It will be interesting to see how it responds. The company is not known for reversing decisions, so greater audits are expected to find customers out of compliance. That will likely lead customers to consider how quickly they can move elsewhere.
This report is good news for Azul and the other Java platform providers. It shows that customers are willing to vote with their feet and their chequebooks. The question is, how quickly can they cash in on this, and can they retain those former Oracle customers once they’ve migrated them?
