A new report from the Java vendor Azul claims that 88% of companies are considering moving off of Oracle Java to another alternative as a result of rising costs and restrictive policies from Oracle, among other issues.
Oracle changed its licensing model for Java two years ago to base the cost on the number of employees an organization has rather than the Java instances they have in use.
Since then, organizations have been contemplating alternatives, and 72% of respondents were already thinking about it when surveyed in 2023.
The top five reasons for wanting to move on from Oracle include cost (42%), preference for open-source (40%), Oracle’s sales tactics (37%), uncertainty around changing licenses and pricing (36%), and restrictive Oracle policies (33%).
The report also found that Java workloads make up more than half of total cloud compute costs for almost two-thirds of respondents. Additionally, 71% of companies have more than 20% of unused cloud compute capacity, and companies are starting to work to address this issue by aligning their cloud investments with their actual usage. Thirty-five percent of respondents are using more efficient compute instances and processes and 24% are utilizing a high-performance JDK.
Java is also continuing to grow in popularity for building AI functionality, with 50% of organizations using it to build AI functionality, surpassing Python and JavaScript at Java-centric companies.
AI adoption also is leading to 72% of organizations saying they need to increase their compute capacity to support those demanding workloads.
”While the survey focused on organizations already invested in Java, it does highlight that Java developers continue to innovate with Java, leveraging the programming language’s robust library ecosystem to embrace emerging technologies like Al. This further solidifies Java’s role as a cornerstone for modern, future-ready application development,” Azul wrote.
For this report, Azul teamed up with Dimensional Research and surveyed 2,039 Java professionals around the world.