A new survey of more than 2,000 Java professionals worldwide, reveals a dual trend shaping the enterprise landscape, a strategic pivot toward using Java as a foundational language for AI development, and a growing migration away from Oracle Java due to pricing and licensing concerns.
The study from Azul shows that 62 percent of organizations now use Java to code AI functionality — up from 50 percent last year — reflecting a shift toward integrating machine learning models with existing Java applications. As enterprises move AI from experimentation to production, Java is becoming indispensable for scaling AI workloads.
At the same time 81 percent have migrated, are migrating, or are planning to migrate at least part of their Oracle Java to a non-Oracle OpenJDK distribution, while a significant 63 percent intend to migrate their entire Java estate. This partly driven by cost (37 percent), since Oracle moved to a user-based pricing model in 2023. Additional reasons enterprises migrate include: a preference for open source (31 percent), uncertainty created by ongoing changes (29 percent) and Oracle Java audit risk (26 percent). 21 percent of survey respondents have already been subjected to an Oracle Java audit.
There’s a focus on optimizing cloud use too. Java continues to play a central role in shaping cost-optimization strategies. Java’s longstanding strengths — reliability at scale, mature performance tuning capabilities and ongoing advancements in start-up, warm-up, and runtime efficiency — make it one of the most productive and cost-effective development languages to operate in cloud environments.
The report reveals that 97 percent of survey participants have taken actions to reduce their public cloud costs, and using a high-performance Java platform (41 percent) is one of the top five strategies they’ve implemented. By utilizing faster, more efficient Java runtimes, businesses are able to process more transactions with fewer resources, translating to savings which directly impact their bottom line or help fund more strategic initiatives.
Despite clear momentum toward optimization however, most enterprises still struggle with significant waste — 74 percent percent of organizations report more than 20 percent unused compute capacity in their public cloud environments. The survey also shows that of those enterprises most invested in Java, where at least 90 percent of their applications run on Java, the number using a high-performance Java platform to improve application performance jumps from 61 percent to 81 percent.
“Java continues to prove its durability and strategic importance as enterprises navigate one of the most transformative periods in modern computing,” says Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO at Azul. “From powering the next generation of AI-driven applications to helping organizations regain control of cloud spend and modernize their estates, Java remains at the center of innovation and operational excellence. This year’s State of Java Survey & Report shows a community that is evolving quickly, embracing open technologies, accelerating cloud optimization and removing the friction that slows DevOps productivity. Azul exists to help organizations realize the full potential of Java, and we’re proud to support this ecosystem as it enters a new era defined by intelligence, performance and choice.”
You can get the full report from the Azul site.
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