Translated and reprinted with permission from iThome
From left: Chiu Ching-Tsun, Technical Manager of GSS’s Information Security Division; Dean Vaughan, Vice President of Azul APAC; Fan Chia Chen, Senior Director of GSS’s Information Security Division; and Senior Manager Long Zhiting.
The AI wave is sweeping the globe, and demand for Java continues to heat up
The generative AI wave is transforming enterprise software architectures and continues to highlight Java’s importance. As AI applications gradually enter enterprise production environments, Java’s advantages in stability, performance, and scalability have once again attracted attention from businesses. Azul, together with Galaxy Software Services Corporation (GSS), has been deeply rooted in the Taiwan market for many years and has achieved an impressive track record. In the future, they will leverage their existing financial industry foundation to seize opportunities in the semiconductor and high-tech sectors, helping enterprises save costs, reduce resource consumption, and improve the overall operational efficiency of Java environments.
The generative AI wave is sweeping across the globe. According to Azul’s “State of Java Survey 2026” report, 62% of enterprises have already used Java to develop or integrate AI features, a significant increase from 50% the previous year, indicating that AI applications are rapidly penetrating existing enterprise systems. As AI applications gradually move from proof-of-concept to practical deployment, enterprises increasingly need technology platforms with high performance, scalability, and stable operational capabilities. Java has long been used by enterprises to develop core systems and applications, remaining an indispensable and important player in this AI era.
Dean Vaughan, Vice President of Azul Asia Pacific, said that although Python is very popular in AI projects, when enterprises want to apply AI technology in production environments, they usually choose Java, which offers high stability, security, and performance. For example, the core technologies supporting AI applications— including Spark, Elasticsearch, and Kafka—all run on the Java architecture. Azul is pleased to collaborate with GSS in the Taiwan market to provide enterprise users with our industry-leading Java products.
Fan Chia Chen, Senior Director of Information Security Division, Galaxy Software Services (GSS), stated that Java, developed for over 30 years, has been widely used by enterprises and offers advantages in cost and development efficiency in the AI era, naturally becoming the development language most relied upon by enterprises. Since its founding, Azul has focused on providing Java-related services. Both professional knowledge and technical support are highly recognized in the market. GSS will continue to work with Azul to provide world-class Java solutions to Taiwanese enterprise clients.
Changes in Oracle Java licensing models are driving customers to shift to Azul
Azul, specializing in Java platforms and enterprise-grade Java runtime environments, has been committed since its founding in 2002 to providing a high-performance, stable Java execution environment with long-term support. As enterprises continue to rely on Java to run critical application systems in the cloud and data centers, optimizing the performance, security, and cost of Java environments has become a key issue in enterprise IT strategy. Azul’s products include Azul Core, Azul Prime, Azul Intelligence Cloud, and more. With the development of AI and cloud-native architectures, it is expected to continuously strengthen the performance and management capabilities of the Java ecosystem.
Azul Core is primarily targeted at financial services, banking, insurance, and utilities troubled by Oracle’s high licensing fees, making it an ideal alternative to Oracle Java. It not only provides a 100% compatible environment but also benefits from Azul’s long-term technical support services. To address the most pressing issues of operational stability and cybersecurity risks, Azul also offers comprehensive technical support mechanisms, including immediate response to critical issues and guaranteed patches within 24 hours for major cybersecurity vulnerabilities (CVEs), ensuring the continuous and secure operation of enterprise systems. Moreover, when enterprises implement Azul Core, they can complete Java environment migration and optimization without major changes to their existing system architecture, significantly reducing migration risks and adoption barriers. For companies that need both stability and efficiency, this is a relatively safe and controllable upgrade path.
Azul Prime is an optimized high-performance JDK with built-in enhanced JVM and compiler technology, delivering an average performance improvement of about 30% to 40% over standard OpenJDK distributions in multiple benchmark tests. In the Kafka test environment, Azul Prime can increase maximum throughput by about 45%, and under given latency SLAs, its capacity is also increased by about 30%, while reducing CPU usage. This enables enterprises to achieve the same or even higher service levels with fewer VMs, making them especially favored by e-commerce, large tech companies, and electronic payment platforms. Azul Intelligence Cloud is a Java application analytics and cost management tool that helps enterprises analyze Java usage, save costs, and improve system performance.
Dean Vaughan pointed out that as the AI era arrives, enterprise Java usage continues to rise, making our performance in the Asia-Pacific region stand out. One of the key drivers of the company’s performance growth stemmed from Oracle’s 2023 shift to a “total number of employees” billing model, which led to soaring licensing fees for large enterprises such as banks. Azul offers a 100% compatible Java runtime environment and can reduce overall costs by about 70%, attracting many enterprises to migrate from Oracle Java to the Azul platform. Especially in the financial industry, beyond cost factors, requirements for technical support and cybersecurity response capabilities are even stricter. Azul provides critical patch updates, professional support services with SLAs, and rapid vulnerability response mechanisms, making it a crucial factor for financial institutions when evaluating Java platforms.
Second, amid the wave of cloud cost optimization, many “cloud-native” tech companies and electronic payment platforms across Asia have chosen to restructure through Azul Prime to reduce expensive cloud costs. Under the same hardware conditions, overall throughput efficiency and latency consistency can be improved. Enterprises can reduce virtual machine resource usage by about 10%, with significant actual savings in some high-load service scenarios, achieving substantial cloud cost reduction.
Azul integrates Payara to enhance enterprise Java and containerization applications
To provide enterprises with more complete Java solutions, Azul announced the inclusion of Payara, a long-term partner, into its Java product portfolio, fully covering the entire ecosystem from the JDK for the underlying Java execution environment to the upper-level application servers. It is an alternative to Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and others. Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten and well-known European automaker BMW have already deployed this product in their production environments.
Dean Vaughan pointed out that Azul Payara Server is specifically designed for “mission-critical application servers,” offering a predictable cost structure to help enterprises completely eliminate vendor binding risks, mainly targeting banking, financial services, insurance, and utilities. Azul Payara Micro, as for its cloud-native design, offers excellent automation and scalability. It is a lightweight runtime optimized for microservice container management, providing the flexibility and scalability needed for AI.
Galaxy Software Services (GSS) is deeply rooted in the financial Java market and has become Azul’s sole partner in Taiwan.
With GSS’s comprehensive technical support services, Azul has performed exceptionally well in the Taiwan market, with the financial industry as its main growth driver. It has helped many bank clients address expensive Oracle licensing issues. For financial institutions, choosing a Java platform means not only focusing on cost but also on long-term stable support and real-time cybersecurity response capabilities. Azul’s advantages in support services, vulnerability remediation timeliness, and system compatibility make it an important choice for financial clients during their transformation journey. To help more financial users understand the product features of Azul Core and Azul Prime, Azul will continue to collaborate with GSS to host various exchange events, inviting bank customers to share their experiences in handling Oracle audits and migrations, hoping to help more financial clients overcome Oracle licensing challenges.
Dean Vaughan pointed out that although Azul continues to expand its channel partners in other countries, it will maintain a single-channel strategy in Taiwan for cooperation with GSS. Thanks to GSS’s outstanding investment and expertise in the Java field, which have earned customer recognition, it has become Azul’s strongest support for deepening its presence in the Taiwan market.
Fan Chia Chen, Senior Director of Information Security Division, Galaxy Software Services (GSS), stated that GSS encourages Taiwanese enterprises to rethink their IT infrastructure from the perspective of Java operational efficiency. A high-performance Java platform not only enhances system performance but also effectively reduces the cost of computing resources. In the future, GSS will continue to collaborate with Azul to further expand into the semiconductor and high-tech sectors, building on its existing success stories in the financial industry, helping Taiwanese enterprises build more efficient and cost-effective Java platforms in the era of rapid AI and cloud applications.
