Azul

Analyst Coverage :

David Norfolk

Azul is a privately-owned company that believes firmly in a Java-centric world and is 100% focused on Java. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that it is entirely focused on code to the exclusion of other issues important to its customers – such as global support  and Java-related security vulnerabilities in production.

Azul has been around since 2002, which gives it excellent provenance, and was co-founded by its CTO, Gil Tene to be like “a toy store for engineers”. Its current President & CEO is co-founder Scott Sellers.

Originally a hardware appliance vendor, it now only sells software, since the introduction of Azul Platform Prime in 2010. It says that it is focused on the sort of leading-edge and core technologies that can make all of its employees proud.

Its main competition is from Oracle which “owns” (or sponsors) Java , and from various “commercial open source” (supported) Javas. Oracle is certainly not 100% focused on Java, which it acquired with its Sun Microsystems acquisition, and (although Oracle has more Java resources available to it) Azul can compete well with it on technology and support in practice; and it has a more customer-friendly sales model. As for the Open Source competition, not everyone likes Open Source; Azul has unique technology; and it has a more enterprise-friendly approach to managing security patches separately to other patches.