Azul, which is 100% focused on Java, has announced the launch of the Azul Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program, a global initiative designed to strengthen collaboration with leading technology providers, accelerate innovation and expand the Java ecosystem. With a customer base spanning over 35% of the Fortune 100, Azul is the largest Java vendor outside of Oracle.
Azul is 100% focused on developing new business with partners though joint go-to-market activities and delivering value-added solutions throughout its partner ecosystem. This new program is designed to foster deep collaboration between Azul and technology partners to deliver integrated solutions that improve developer productivity, DevOps efficiency, business productivity and cloud efficiency for Java customers worldwide. The program focuses on developing mutually beneficial partnerships that empower partners to increase deal flow, revenue, and help deliver customer value. It comes on the heels of Azul’s new Managed Services Provider Program for Azul Intelligence Cloud, a program set up approximately two months ago that allows MSPs to embed Azul Intelligence Cloud’s Java inventory, vulnerability and code use analytics directly into their Java advisory, license management, security operations and DevOps services.
“Java remains the backbone of modern enterprise and cloud-native applications, and at Azul, our mission is to give enterprises more — more performance, more value and more choice,” said George Gould, senior vice president, Corporate Development and Strategic Alliances at Azul. “The Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program is a powerful catalyst for innovation, enabling Azul and our ecosystem partners to co-create solutions that streamline development and operations, as well as make Java run more securely and more cost-effectively across today’s distributed environments. By aligning with technology leaders who share our vision, we can help our joint customers boost application performance, reduce costs and enhance security across their Java landscape.”
Those financial benefits for customers involve creating a Java license and services revenue stream by saving customers up to 70% vs. Oracle Java SE license fees, earn 30%+ margins on single and multi-year deals, services, expansions, and renewals, and helping your customers improve the raw speed of Java applications, such as up to 20% faster Apache Kafka event streaming.
The TAP program provides a formal framework for joint technical integrations, solution development, and go-to-market activities between Azul and its alliance partners. By joining the TAP program, partners gain access to Azul’s innovative products, Java expertise, joint marketing initiatives, sales team and channel to bring high-value, validated solutions to market faster for their shared customers. TAP is part of Azul’s overall PartnerConnect Program – in addition to technology alliance ISVs, Azul’s broader PartnerConnect ecosystem includes solution providers, authorized value-added resellers and authorized distributors.
Benefits of being a TAP partner include technical collaboration with Azul product managers and engineers to aid solution integration and optimization, and a Accelerated innovation and development through access to cutting-edge Java technologies, expertise and resources that can accelerate product development. On the marketing and sales side, it leads to joint marketing initiatives, including co-branded content, events and campaigns and access to new markets and customer segments that can significantly boost sales and brand awareness. It also provides access to Azul’s ecosystem, connecting partners with the world’s leading Java innovators and community.
Gould emphasized, however, that all of this costs money, which is not always well spent.
“This is crazy,” he said. “83% of CIOs are overspending on cloud! So how are they balancing cost control with innovation? We are proud to announce that Azul continues to enhance our Java offerings on AWS with our high-performance Azul Platform Prime JDK. With Prime, AWS customers can improve topline revenue contributions, helping companies grow their business, or Prime can reduce infrastructure costs, helping companies trim expenses.”
Azul’s Technology Alliance Partner Program delivers tangible customer value by integrating best-of-breed Java technologies to provide solutions in four key areas which, collectively, make Azul’s partner ecosystem a powerful force multiplier for enterprises seeking to maximize the value of their Java investments. Developer Tools and Productivity enable developers to be more productive — writing better code faster, deploying more frequently and responding rapidly to production security issues. DevOps Efficiency improves the automation and optimization of key aspects of the development and IT operation lifecycle. Business benefits drive the company’s top-line revenue growth through improved Java application performance and metrics, and cloud cost savings reduces Java’s infrastructure footprint and right-sizing compute resources without sacrificing performance.
“Free Java is a good option for some enterprises, but you get what you pay for,” Gould warned. “Every enterprise needs a trusted Java advisor and timely guaranteed access to ‘updated and secure’ Java binaries..
The inaugural TAP members include leading companies in supply chain security, development and modernization. Azul will continue expanding the program throughout 2025 with additional partners across key technology categories. Moderne is a global online employment marketplace vendor using Azul Intelligence Cloud to surface unused and dead code, and estimated it would take 21 person-years to remove all their unused code. By applying Moderne’s OpenRewrite-based platform with Azul’s runtime intelligence, the company automated that remediation, doing in days what would have taken years. They were able to go from a project that was often ignored or handled sparingly to one that can be tackled decisively at scale.
“Modernizing enterprise Java applications is a massive challenge. Moderne enables our customers to tackle technical debt at scale — bringing entire fleets of applications forward in parallel,” said Jonathan Schneider, CEO and co-founder of Moderne. “Partnering with Azul gives us the real-time data to drive transformations across codebases faster and with greater confidence.”
Payara is a large securities industry foundation which needed to modernize its aging financial education platform used by thousands of users, and migrated to Payara Platform Enterprise, which includes Azul Platform Core and Azul Platform Prime as the default JVMs.
“We just launched something cool at Azul: a joint solution with Payara that increases Java performance and scalability and accelerates application delivery and modernization without the typical refactoring headaches associated with moving to the cloud,” Gould said. “This will help teams reduce infrastructure costs and run more efficiently. With Payara Qube and Azul Platform Prime, you’ll get increased Java performance and scalability with faster time-to-deployment.” It wound up increasing user capacity per machine by 2.5 times while unlocking scalability opportunities.”
A U.S. wealth management firm that was struggling with CVE remediation. Instead of chasing enormous CVE patch backlogs, the firm chose to focus solely on the vulnerabilities within its applications, while RapidFort and Azul focused on the rest (e.g., RapidFort containers embedded with Azul Java runtimes). This resulted in a significant improvement in developer productivity and the velocity of new deployments.
“Performance and security go hand in hand, especially in cloud environments where efficiency is critical,” said George Manuelian, Chief Strategy and Sales Officer, at RapidFort. “By joining Azul’s TAP program, we’re giving enterprises the ability to optimize Java workloads with a dramatically smaller attack surface and lower cloud costs.”