A new report from Java vendor Azul says 88% of companies are considering switching from Oracle Java to an alternative, in part because of rising costs and restrictive policies from Oracle.
Oracle changed its licensing model for Java two years ago, basing costs on the number of employees in an organization rather than the number of Java instances they use. Since then, organizations have been considering alternatives, and 72% of respondents in a 2023 survey said they were already looking for options.
The top five reasons for leaving Oracle are cost (42%), a preference for open source (40%), Oracle’s sales methods (37%), uncertainty around changing licenses and pricing (36%), and restrictive Oracle policies (33%).
Lots of unused cloud computing capacity
The report also shows that Java workloads account for more than half of total cloud computing costs for nearly two-thirds of respondents. In addition, 71% of companies have more than 20% unused cloud computing capacity, and companies are beginning to address this issue by better aligning their cloud investments with their actual usage. Thirty-five percent of respondents are using more efficient compute instances and processes, and 24% are using a high-performance JDK.
Java also continues to grow in popularity for building AI functionality, with 50% of organizations using it to develop AI applications, overtaking Python and JavaScript in Java-oriented businesses.
The adoption of AI is also leading 72% of organizations to say they need to expand their computing capacity to meet heavy workloads.
In a toeilchting, Azul writes that the survey focused on organizations already investing in Java. The report highlights that Java developers continue to innovate with Java and leverage the programming language’s robust library ecosystems to embrace emerging technologies such as AI.
For this report, Azul partnered with Dimensional Research and surveyed 2,039 Java professionals worldwide.
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