The latest State of Java report from Azul Systems shows that the 30-year-old programming language has moved with the times and is being used for advanced applications like adding artificial intelligence (AI).
More than 2,000 Java users were surveyed for this year’s report. Half (50%) of them were found to be building AI-enabled functionality that uses Java, surpassing the use of other popular languages, such as Python, that are more culturally associated with AI. This, according to Azul Systems, highlights Java’s “fit-for-purpose” nature, offering scalability, extensive libraries and seamless integration with existing enterprise systems.
Java uses a runtime platform and software development environment known as the Java Development Kit (JDK) for developing and running applications. It is one of the main languages used to build enterprise systems.
While Oracle sells the JDK commercially as Oracle JDK, there is also an open source version called OpenJDK.
Java for AI applications
“All of us who are involved in OpenJDK are advancing Java so that it can much more rapidly integrate with AI capabilities,” said Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul Systems.
According to Sellers, a lot of traditional applications developers are using Java to build their AI-enabled applications, by using application programming interfaces (APIs) to send queries to the large language model (LLM).
Good old Java is the best out there because of its scale, resiliency and security Scott Sellers, Azul Systems
This is a very different approach to that taken by data scientists, who need to run ad hoc queries on the data using a language such as Python.
“Production-level applications need to handle hundreds of thousands and millions of users simultaneously, and good old Java is the best out there because of its scale, resiliency and security,” said Sellers.
He also pointed out that Java has been tried and tested over the decades, which makes it an extremely stable and well understood platform for running enterprise applications.
Oracle licensing changes
However, cost has become a barrier for some organisations, given the licensing changes Oracle has made to Oracle JDK. According to research from Gartner, this makes it two to five times more costly than the subscription model it replaces.
Gartner’s 3 steps to manage exposure for Oracle Java SE licensing report, published at the end of January, notes: “If anyone in your organisation has downloaded any Oracle Java SE updates since April 2019, you probably need a subscription – and you may have a compliance risk. You may determine that you want an Oracle Java SE subscription if you need a commercial support agreement, particularly if you are using a very old or new release of Java, such as Java 7 or 21.”
Beyond the Java subscription cost, Azul’s survey shows that some organisations are choosing not to buy maintenance and support for Oracle JDK. Of the survey participants who do not pay for Java support, 21% cited expense as a deterrent, 31% said it was not a priority, and a significant 52% believed they simply did not need it.
According to Azul Systems, this divide highlights the trade-offs organisations face between upfront costs and the long-term value of secure, reliable application performance, particularly in environments where stability and security are non-negotiable.
Azul Systems believes the growing dissatisfaction reflects a pressing need for cost-effective concerns about affordability, fuelled in part by organisations re-examining their long-term strategies for managing Java licensing and support costs, driving a search for more predictable and sustainable options.
In Azul’s previous survey, 72% of Oracle Java users were already considering a switch to another JDK provider. That has surged to 88% in the latest Azul survey.
Although 88% are considering switching from Oracle and 82% are concerned about the Oracle Java pricing, Sellers said some of the respondents were not directly impacted by the price increases, since the cost of Java is in someone else’s budget. “A developer whose whole life is about Java may not see a direct budget impact because someone else is paying the licence fee,” he said.
Application owners are also not the people who ultimately pay for Java. The cost tends to be hidden since it is considered infrastructure, in the same way that facilities and internet access are budgeted as infrastructure. Software and infrastructure costs that are shared across applications cannot be managed by application owners, which means, according to Sellers, that they focus on other ways to reduce costs, rather than looking at the Oracle JDK licence bill.
The survey, according to Sellers, showed that users realise they do not need to use Oracle JDK because the same functionality is available from OpenJDK. “Why would you choose something that’s commercially licensed with restrictions as opposed to open source?”
It tends to be the head of IT or CIO who ultimately makes the decision and is able to force a change.
Sellers said Oracle is extremely aggressive in terms of audits, where it often demands usage reports from users. “If you don’t want to deal with software audits, then you may as well just get off Oracle and move on to something that’s inherently open source and doesn’t require commercial software licensing,” he added.
Complexity of switching
One of Azul Systems’ focus areas is helping enterprises understand their inventory of Oracle Java and working with them to deliver what Sellers calls “a like-for-like replacement”. This can be particularly difficult since many different versions of Java may be in use, each of which needs replacing with the correct version of OpenJDK to ensure Java applications that rely on a specific version of the JDK do not break.
“One of the challenges that exists when an organisation is looking to move off Oracle Java is that Oracle provides about 1,000 updates a quarter,” said Sellers.
This is further complicated by the fact that there may be patches for specific major releases of Java and minor releases. “Unless you have a like-for-like equivalent for all of those different versions and subversions you’re using from Oracle and you’re trying to move, you can run into incompatibility problems, and that can be challenging.”
Give its extensive footprint, Java is set to play a major role in enterprise IT for many years to come. However, IT leaders are highly likely to switch from Oracle JDK to cheaper options.