Azul is 100% focused on Java, delivering the most trusted Java platform to the modern cloud enterprise. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Azul CEO and co-founder Scott Sellers to learn more about the company.
Scott Sellers’ Background
What is your background? Sellers said:
“I attended Princeton, where I majored in computer engineering while also taking a bunch of computer science classes. Learning both these disciplines gave me an early understanding of the amazing things that could be done when a company builds both the hardware and software, as later evidenced in great products being built by companies like Cisco and Apple. Outside of academics, I was a quarterback on the football team, mostly as a backup to Jason Garrett, who went on to be an NFL coach and broadcaster. Serving as QB gave me the foundation for my leadership approach years later.”
“After graduating college, I started my career as a chip engineer at Silicon Graphics (SGI), one of the great companies in Silicon Valley at the time. I then went on to co-found 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company that pioneered the 3D graphics market for personal computers and game consoles, which was later sold to NVIDIA.”
Formation of Azul
How did the idea for the company come together? Sellers shared:
“We had sold 3dfx to NVIDIA, and I was looking for something new to do, specifically in the enterprise space. I was introduced to two people who were also interested in starting a company – Gil Tene, our CTO of Azul, and Shyam Pillalamarri. Both had experience building applications with Java from their last company (Shasta Networks), so were familiar with the productivity benefits of the language but also experienced some of the challenges with Java at the time in terms of speed, scale and garbage collection. They were interested in exploring opportunities for Java in the enterprise, and as I dug in to learn more I became excited about the popularity and growing relevance of Java for the enterprise.”
“Coming together to found Azul, the three of us recognized that we could develop innovative products specifically for enterprise Java use cases. We felt that we could build a microprocessor that was incredibly efficient at running Java with some hooks built into that hardware that would make the pains of Java go away. So originally, Azul was started as a Java hardware company, with a mission to deliver innovative “compute appliances” for enterprise customers. We felt we had unique advantages by building both the hardware and software and delivering a fully integrated solution.”
Favorite Aspect Of Azul
What is your favorite part of Azul? Sellers reflected:
“Honestly, my favorite part of Azul are the companies that we engage with and the businesses that we help every day. What many people may not realize is that Java touches all of our lives countless times every day, even though they may not know it. For example, what’s really fun for me is knowing that when I watch something through my favorite streaming service, that’s all back-ended by very complex applications running on Java. And every time I use a credit card, all that processing and fraud detection is happening on a platform that is powered by Azul. I’m a big coffee guy, and it’s so satisfying knowing that when I use my phone to order my coffee that it is a cloud-based application running on Java on Azul. It’s all about where our technology is being used, and the role we have in helping customers do important things with Java.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Sellers explained:
- Azul Intelligence Cloud – Intelligence Cloud is Azul’s cloud analytics solution, which provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to dramatically boost developer productivity and efficiency with insights from an organization’s entire Java estate, regardless of JDK distribution or vendor. It consists of two primary capabilities, Vulnerability Detection to eliminate false positives by accurately identifying and prioritizing known security vulnerabilities and Code Inventory, to help identify unused and dead code by precisely detailing what custom and third-party code is actually run in production.
- Azul Platform Core – Based on OpenJDK, Platform Core is a 100% open-source equivalent to Oracle JDK and provides developers with the tools and libraries they need to create Java applications that run on any device, ranging from servers to cloud containers to desktops to various embedded devices. Azul provides Java Development Kits (JDKs) and Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) for all versions of Java, which are built to be Java SE specification compliant and Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) verified. We have a 100% success rate migrating hundreds of enterprises off Oracle Java to Azul Platform Core, typically saving our customers 70%+ in Oracle Java license and support fees.
- Azul Platform Prime – Azul Platform Prime is an enhanced build of OpenJDK that offers superior performance, consistency, and efficiency. Prime improves application responsiveness and consistency and maintains performance SLAs – even as loads increase – for Java applications and Java infrastructure. Using the performance advantages of Prime enables enterprises to cut cloud compute costs by more than 20%. Prime also allows developers to build and develop new application features faster by reducing the time it takes to respond to performance issues and operational tickets. According to Forrester, Prime achieves 224% ROI by reducing total server count, simplifying operations, and improving developer productivity.
Evolution Of Azul
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Sellers noted:
“Since Azul’s inception, we’ve been true to our mission and our vision of enabling enterprise businesses to run their applications and infrastructure better. What’s changed over time is our product strategy to be able to address that need in various market segments. In the early days of Azul, we were a hardware-based solution. We had some good success with the product, and as our customers began to view us as a strategic vendor, they wanted to broaden their use of Azul and started asking us for a software solution. We had already begun some proof of concepts, but when the market drastically changed with the financial crisis in 2008, we knew it was time to pivot our product strategy and go in a different direction.”
“While we changed our product strategy to be focused on software solutions, we retained our focus on global 5000 enterprises and building the best Java runtimes for enterprises to solve the most pressing challenges they faced. Our first software product was Platform Prime (at the time called Zing) which was a very similar value proposition as our hardware solution – it was about speed, scale, and consistency. The more we gained experience in the software segment of the Java market, we learned about the potential of a whole new market segment – supporting customers that were frustrated with Oracle’s licensing practice changes and wanted a Java alternative.”
“Out of this feedback, Platform Core was born. As we continued to build our business globally, our customers were asking for help with application security and developer productivity, and this ultimately led to building our Intelligence Cloud product. If you step back and look at the history of Azul, we’ve done everything from building custom Java microprocessors and hardware compute appliances, to open-source software, to value-added software, and most recently SaaS products. But we have always remained true to our mission to enable businesses to run their applications and infrastructure better.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? “In addition to transitioning from a hardware to a software company and launching our three main products, we’ve had several other significant milestones along the way. One of which was creating our Azul Zulu product (a certified build of OpenJDK) in partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft came to us with a proposal to offer a supported Java runtime on Azure Cloud as they were getting customers coming to them asking for Java in the cloud – however, their customers did not want to bring Oracle into the mix. So Zulu for Azure was actually the first supported Java runtime that Microsoft had on Azure. And that was the kickstart to building Zulu in general.”
“Another significant milestone for the company was the completion of our partnership with Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital, which we announced in April 2020. This strategic growth investment partnership has enabled us to build out our leadership team, expand our go-to-market and channel capabilities, and take product development to another level – all setting us up for continued future growth.
While it’s not a specific milestone, I’d also mention one of our proudest accomplishments, which is earning the business of so many important companies around the world. Today, Azul is used by more than 36% of the Fortune 100, 50% of Forbes Top 10 World’s Most Valuable Brands, and the world’s Top 10 financial trading companies.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Sellers about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Here are just a few examples of how we help our customers improve their day-to-day operations and help solve some of the biggest challenges facing business today.”
“One customer, a global payment technology corporation, used to experience high latency and nearly 10,000 application “hiccups” (specifically, garbage collection pauses) a day. In addition, they needed to improve their ability to identify fraud in real-time to decline a transaction before any exposure took place. With Azul Platform Prime, the company increased its transaction volume throughput by 5x while simultaneously eliminating the “hiccups” and latency spikes. This provided significant operational cost savings and saved (and continues to save) millions of dollars in detecting and remediating fraudulent transactions.”
“Another Platform Prime customer, a foreign exchange trading solution, has more than 200 leading banks, asset managers, corporates and hedge funds using their exchange. The company went from running hundreds of millions of messages per day, to running 10 billion messages per day with no increase in latencies. This has allowed them to remain tops in an ultra-competitive market.”
“For our Platform Core customers, we consistently see cost savings of 70%+ in comparison to what they were spending with Oracle for Java licensing/support. We also consistently hear our support is much more responsive, and that our long-term support for even very old versions of Java saves them significant development time and resources without having to needlessly upgrade versions. The cumulative impact we have for each of our Platform Core customers is measured in millions of dollars of savings per year, allowing them to invest in and prioritize their most important initiatives for their business.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Sellers assessed:
“While Oracle does not publicly disclose the amount of Java licensing and support business they do, industry analysts estimate it’s currently over $2 billion per year and likely more than doubling in the next five years, across more than 10,000 customers. So that’s a bullseye for us with our Platform Core product. For Platform Prime and how our customers use it to cut cloud spend, Gartner pegs spending on public cloud to be greater than $600 billion in 2023 – that’s obviously quite a large TAM for us to pursue. Finally, the market size for just the Application Security capability of our Intelligence Cloud product is $6.1 billion and growing rapidly. We serve a multitude of quite large and growing markets!”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Sellers affirmed:
“Azul provides the most widely used non-Oracle, commercially supported JDKs/JVMs. Our products are based on the open source OpenJDK project, the community which collectively evolves Java. While there are many freely available builds of OpenJDK, Azul is unique in having the expertise and track record of supporting some of the most important businesses around the world. Our customers have seen our maniacal focus on their success through the years, and we’ve earned the right to power their most business-critical applications.”
“Azul’s products also include technology that simply doesn’t exist from any other vendor. Platform Prime, for example, is the world’s fastest JVM, significantly improving the performance, consistency and scale of Java applications and infrastructure without any code changes. It also addresses slow application “warm-up” problems and fixes the Achilles heel of the Java runtime – pauses and ‘hiccups’ associated with garbage collection.”
“Azul Intelligence Cloud is also unique in leveraging production Java runtime data to eliminate false positives commonly associated with application security tools, and also provides insight into what code is run in production to allow developers to remove unused/dead code and stop wasting time maintaining it. These are capabilities that significantly improve DevOps teams’ productivity.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Sellers concluded:
“We feel we’re still at the tip of the iceberg in all three of the market segments that we currently address – there is a huge TAM out there that we have only just begun to capture. But if we step back and look at how prevalent Java is throughout the enterprise, the question is how do we help solve the next big business challenges our customers will face?”
“For example, three or four years ago cloud cost optimization was not necessarily the top of mind for the C-Suite. But today? This is a significant problem, and our approach has been to help solve this problem through a better, more efficient Java runtime. This is exactly what Platform Prime does for our customers in addition to fixing application latency and performance issues. So as the market evolves and business needs and challenges change, we evolve to help meet those needs. Because Java – as a language, as a platform, and as infrastructure – is so prevalent in the enterprise, we feel confident there is always a way to leverage the Java runtime to help solve these pressing business priorities.”
