Winners chosen for excellence in Java migration speed and execution, and outstanding achievements in cloud cost savings and performance gains

Azul, the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced the winners of its inaugural Azul Java Hero Awards. This year's awards recognized 17 organizations, teams and individual champions globally who achieved innovative world-class results with Java to help their businesses become more cost-effective, successful and efficient.

Nominations for the Azul Java Hero Awards were submitted from all regions and industries and included companies of all sizes. Winning organizations were selected based on their exceptional Java use cases in areas such as Oracle Java migration, cloud cost optimization, performance gains and DevOps productivity.

“I'm inspired to see the remarkable ways in which companies around the world are leveraging Java to drive innovation, deliver exceptional performance, and optimize costs,” said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO at Azul. “The winners of our inaugural Azul Java Hero Awards embody the best of what can be achieved with Java, showcasing its enduring power and versatility in enterprise software. Their achievements highlight why Java remains the go-to language for businesses striving for excellence and efficiency.”

Highlights from Azul’s 2024 Java Hero Awards

Application Performance — Operations & Efficiency: Workday

Workday is a leading enterprise platform that helps organizations manage their most important assets – their people and money. With Azul Platform Prime, Workday reduced the total application pause time per JVM from 20,000 seconds per week to 14 seconds per week. The company also improved the vertical scalability of key high-performance services from 200GB to 6TB per application instance. Workday improved its operational efficiency in managing its Java runtime by over 95%, eliminating over 42,000 person-hours across an 18-month period. Instead of spending time on performance tuning and troubleshooting, Workday saved millions of dollars while freeing its developers to do more productive work.

Best Industry Use Case — Public Sector: Newcastle City Council

As the local government authority providing services to over 300,000 residents of Newcastle, the largest city in northeast England, Newcastle City Council (NCC) is committed to maintaining the highest security standards through annual audits. While these audits had previously highlighted Java related vulnerabilities due to unsupported Oracle Java versions, NCC took decisive action to address these challenges without disrupting their essential Java based line of business systems used daily by approximately 1,100 employees. By moving to Azul Platform Core, NCC received a one-for-one equivalent to a commercial support subscription from Oracle, including Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) for Java 6, 7 and 8, that allowed IT to immediately deploy security fixes in production. The transition also fortified their Java environment across 5,000 desktops and ensured their systems remained robust, efficient, secure and in compliance.

“Through our strategic partnership with Azul, we significantly reduced our security risk level with our Java applications and Java-based infrastructure, which certainly helps me sleep better at night,” said Jenny Nelson, NCC’s head of ICT & Digital.

Application Performance – Customer Experience: Travelport

Travelport is a global technology company that powers travel bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide. Without Travelport, many travel agencies and websites would be unable to serve up options like checked bags, seat selections, upgrades, and even ticketing. Travelport’s application suite experienced spikes in reduced performance until it implemented Azul Platform Prime on two applications. On an ETL (extract, transform, load) process, response times immediately improved, allowing Travelport to publish travel content to its customers even faster. Travelport also reduced a query application’s response time by an impressive 80%, lowered its error rate, and virtually eliminated slower and stalled transactions. In addition, Azul enabled Travelport to reduce server use by 33% over a period where transaction volumes increased by 19%, resulting in significant cost avoidance.

Best Industry Use Case — Trading Exchanges: SGX FX

SGX FX, formerly BidFX, is a pioneer in developing foreign exchange (FX) trading technology solutions that set new industry standards for functionality and performance and is trusted by over 200 leading banks, asset managers, corporates, and hedge funds. In its commitment to provide unparalleled performance and reliability, the company transitioned its 10 billion messages per day SaaS trading platform from Oracle Java to Azul Platform Prime. This transition underscores SGX FX’s ability to manage a high volume of transactions at optimal speed, ensuring minimal latencies and faster trading.

“Working with Azul Platform Prime, we have achieved exceptional transaction processing speeds and reliability, enhancing our overall platform performance,” said Paul Sweeny, chief architect at SGX FX. “Latency in a large system is like a bar of soap; just when you’ve got it pinned down in one place, it skites off and pops up elsewhere. With Azul, we can focus development on garbage collection-free and ultra-low latency solutions in the critical components and let Azul Platform Prime address garbage collection and other latencies everywhere else.”

Java Migration Trailblazer: Jeff Korpa, Teledyne Controls

When Jeff Korpa, engineering tools manager at Teledyne Controls, became aware of Oracle’s pricing changes to its Java SE, he began to take steps to phase out the use of Oracle Java SE from the various software tools / software applications that he managed across the organization to both protect the business and save his company substantial costs. He quickly realized that a free alternative to Oracle Java meant that he would not have access to Critical Patch Updates (CPUs), which his organization required to remain stable and secure. By switching to Azul Platform Core, he was able to receive these critical updates at a much more competitive price than Oracle, along with top-tier support to answer any migration-related questions quickly, accurately and professionally. “To the best of my knowledge, there are only two providers of CPUs: Oracle and Azul. Obtaining CPUs from Oracle was no longer desirable due to a substantial cost increase for the same product and service compared to Azul, and the pricing for Oracle Java SE was no longer associated with the actual usage as of January 2023, when Oracle changed to employee-based pricing,” said Korpa.

Best Industry Use Case – Gaming: Jagex

Jagex is a British video game developer and leader in creating deep and engaging live games on PC and mobile. Jagex’s flagship MMORPG, RuneScape, has welcomed over 320 million player accounts to its world and is a $1.5 billion lifetime revenue franchise. At one time, pauses and lags in the Java-based platform were causing delays and impacting the gamer experience. Jagex used Azul Platform Prime to eliminate ticks over 600ms, erasing any pauses a gamer can detect while playing. Jagex improved gaming performance by 20% and massively improved the overall gaming experience.

Application Performance – Speeds & Feeds: LMAX Group

LMAX Group is a global financial technology company and the leading independent operator of multiple institutional execution venues for FX and digital asset trading. LMAX Group processes sustained volumes of over 100,000 orders/second capable of bursting to almost a million orders/second per exchange at peak. LMAX Group and Azul have seen a close third-line, mutually beneficial engineering partnership for over a decade by trading performance figures, code and test suites. This has greatly contributed to the enhancement of LMAX Group’s leading low-latency trade execution capabilities and has enabled the team to focus on innovating to scale rapid growth.

“Our long-term partnership and the results we achieved in company with Azul are a testament to the strength of the partnership and the combined technologies that form its basis. We look forward to continuing to innovate and scale on the Azul platform,” said Andrew Phillips, chief technology officer, LMAX Group.

Best Industry Use Case – AdTech: Taboola

Taboola powers recommendations for the open web, helping people discover things they may like. Around 18,000 advertisers use Taboola to reach nearly 600 million daily active users in a brand-safe environment. Taboola relies on big data and personalization to successfully place relevant content for individual users. Timeouts, pauses, and slow performance are not acceptable. With Azul Platform Prime, Taboola improved performance and flattened the 95th percentile of the SLA. This use case spans multiple technologies within the tech stack, impacting the performance of open-source software such as the Cassandra (C*) database and internally developed Java applications. Taboola reduced its database server footprint by 50% and its front-end server footprint by 30%. This reduction in server count translates to hundreds of servers and significant savings in both cost and environmental impact.

The full list of Java Hero award categories include:

• Oracle Java Migration — Java Migration Execution
• Oracle Java Migration — Java Migration Speed
• Cloud Cost Optimization — Cloud & Infrastructure Cost Savings
• Application Performance — Operations & Efficiency
• Application Performance — Customer Experience
• Application Performance — Speeds & Feeds
• Best Industry Use Case — Trading Exchange
• Best Industry Use Case — Energy
• Best Industry Use Case — Risk & Fraud
• Best Industry Use Case — Gaming
• Best Industry Use Case — Public Sector
• Best Industry Use Case — Higher Education
• Best Industry Use Case — Retail
• Best Industry Use Case — AdTech
• Java Innovation Team
• Java Hero of the Year
• Java Migration Trailblazer

Click here to learn more about Azul’s Java Heroes.

About Azul Systems Inc.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Azul provides the Java platform for the modern cloud enterprise. Azul is the only company 100% focused on Java. Millions of Java developers, hundreds of millions of devices and the world’s most highly regarded businesses trust Azul to power their applications with exceptional capabilities, performance, security, value, and success. Azul customers include 36% of the Fortune 100, 50% of Forbes top-10 World’s Most Valuable Brands, all 10 of the world’s top-10 financial trading companies and leading brands like Avaya, Bazaarvoice, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Mastercard, Mizuho, Priceline, Salesforce, Software AG, and Workday. Learn more at azul.com and follow us @azulsystems.

Azul is a registered trademark of Azul Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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