Addressing the cloud paradox with resource optimisation
One of the most prestigious universities in Australia, the University of Sydney, has selected Azul as their sole Java provider in anticipation of reaping benefits like substantial cost savings, as well as more predictability and ease of doing business.
Executive Member of the University’s Software Licensing Community and Vendor Management Specialist, Emiliano Fisanotti, said, the university is always looking for efficiency from their IT vendor relationships, via cost reductions as well as eliminating uncertainty.
“Supporting so many departments and managing a wide range of vendor relationships means I can’t afford to worry about unexpected headaches such as price increases and audits,” he said.
Besides serving over 74,000 students and enabling 8,100 staff members, the university has a role as a research university. All of this is supported by a vast IT footprint of heterogeneous technologies including thousands of desktops running Java-based applications.
Recognising the importance of robust Java support, as well as the need to secure its huge Java-based sprawl, the university’s IT team also wanted to avoid the risk and cost of non-compliance from complex audit processes.
Azul was a natural choice for Sydney University to turn to, due to it being the second largest Java vendor after Oracle. According to Gartner, “By 2025, more than 70% of Java applications will be deployed on third-party Java runtimes, up from 30% in 2019.” After Oracle made major changes to its Oracle Java pricing, Azul presented as the best alternative because of its support for the widest range of Java versions, as well as its track record of providing a secure, compatible, and compliant Java runtime at 70-percent less cost than Oracle.
Ian Whiting, Chief Revenue Officer of Azul, assured that Azul is training their partners to ensure customers who switch to Oracle are “well taken care of.”
Another compelling reason
The cloud paradox is another reason for organisations to seriously consider Azul as the viable alternative. Organisations are starting to discover that cloud costs are beginning to spiral upwards, defeating one of the main reasons they adopted cloud in the first place. This is to the extent that a new role has emerged in these businesses: that of finops or financial operations, to study the cost of cloud and/IT operations, and work specifically to reduce it.
According to Azul’s VP in Asia Pacific, Dean Vaughan, most organisations that he encounters have workloads that are located on more than one cloud provider’s platform. Without scale on any one platform, these organisations often find it difficult to renegotiate discounts for their workloads.
He observed organisations have difficulty having the policies and procedures in place to regulate cloud costs, which makes the matter stickier than it already is.
More savvy organisations have looked at the layers of their technology stack and considered re-engineering certain layers so as to significantly reduce their compute requirements, which in turn can reduce cloud costs.
Another way to reduce compute requirements is using Azul’s JVM instead of the cloud provider’s JVM. It is as simple as swapping the JVM file.
The open source nature of Java in the OpenJDK project offers a range of options, Azul being one of them. A report by New Relic stated, “In 2020, Oracle was the most popular JDK vendor, comprising roughly 75% of the Java market…While Oracle retained the top spot in 2022 with 34%, it slipped to 28% in 2023.”
In summary, using Azul’s JVM solution offered by their Prime platform, enables technology stack re-architecting which leads to optimisation of compute resources and substantial savings.