Azul Delivers Strong FY26 Momentum Fueled by Java Platform Innovation, Channel Expansion and a Growing Enterprise Java Ecosystem

India Apr 20: Azul, the trusted leader in enterprise Java for today’s AI and cloud-first world, today announced strong corporate momentum in FY26 as enterprises increasingly turned to its platform to deliver consistent performance across increasingly complex environments, optimize cloud costs, modernize Java at scale and take greater control over Java pricing and licensing costs.

The company saw strong customer growth across all of its product lines, with momentum pronounced in market segments where performance, reliability and compliance are mission-critical. Industries where Azul experienced particularly high new bookings growth include Finance, which saw a 43% YoY growth, Healthcare (606% YoY), Retail (120% YoY) and Telecommunications (241% YoY). Customers in these industries leveraged Azul Prime, Azul Core and Azul Intelligence Cloud to ensure their Java applications perform consistently under real‑world enterprise demands.

Java Innovation and Recognition

Azul’s continued growth was fueled by the company’s product and technology innovation. Key innovations and customer milestones in FY26 include:

• Azul Intelligence Cloud & Azul Migration Toolkit: Introduced in April 2025, JVMI Inventory, a feature of Azul Intelligence Cloud, is a cloud service that continuously catalogs running JVMs to help accelerate and simplify Oracle Java migrations. Combined with the Azul Migration Toolkit, these tools deliver a complete solution that enables organizations to:

o   Discover and inventory their Oracle Java instances.

o   Accurately classify and prioritize these installations for replacement or removal.

o   Help ensure ongoing compliance by detecting any new running Oracle Java instances.

•  Prime Optimzer Hub: In September 2025, Azul announced a breakthrough in cloud deployment at scale with Prime, achieving a historic first with a global customer who deployed hundreds of applications and micro services across 10,000+ JVMs using a single instance of Prime’s Optimizer Hub. This unique capability allows JVMs to collaborate and share performance optimizations across the entire Java fleet.
• Customer Success: In December 2025, Azul announced that Australia’s largest electricity distributor, Ausgrid, eliminated its Oracle Java audit exposure and reduced licensing costs by 80% and reduced its Java-related vulnerabilities by 99% by migrating to Azul Core.

Azul’s product innovation was recognized throughout the year with 12 industry awards; highlights include:

• Prime was awarded “Cloud Infrastructure of the Year” for the 2025 Tech Ascension Awards, and “Cloud Cost Management” for InfoWorld’s 2025 Technology of the Year.
• Prime was also honored with a 2025 Gold Stevie International Business Award for “Cloud Application/Service.”
• Intelligence Cloud won four awards in 2025, including InfoWorld’s “Technology of the Year: DevOps Analytics,” a Gold Stevie American Business Award and a Gold Stevie International Business Award for “DevOps Solution,” and a Gold Stevie Award for Technology Excellence for “New Product of the Year – Business Technology.”
• Azul’s CEO Scott Sellers was recognized by The Software Report for the “2025 Top Software CEOs.”
• Simon Taylor, Azul’s VP of Global Channel & Alliances, was named one of “CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs” and Azul’s PartnerConnect program was included in “CRN’s 2025 Partner Program Guide.”

Fueling the Next Phase of Growth and Innovation

To support its next phase of growth, Azul made a series of moves to expand its platform, accelerate innovation and broaden its enterprise reach. Strategic investment and targeted expansion in late 2025 positioned the company to scale faster, deepen platform capabilities and better serve enterprises modernizing mission-critical Java applications.

In November 2025, the company announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to receive a majority strategic investment from Thoma Bravo. This strategic investment supports Azul’s continued growth to meet the rising demand for high-performance Java platforms, scale its engineering efforts, accelerate innovation in runtime performance, observability and security tooling, and expand its reach in global enterprise and cloud markets.

In December 2025, shortly after the close of the Thoma Bravo investment, Azul announced the acquisition of Payara, a global provider of enterprise-grade solutions for Jakarta EE-based applications. With this strategic acquisition, Azul now offers customers a unified, enterprise-grade Java platform based on open-source that can support an organization’s entire Java fleet.

Channel and Alliances Drive Accelerated Growth

Azul’s channel and alliance ecosystem continued to be a major growth engine in FY26, driving expansion across regions and routes to market. Investments in channel scale, managed services and technology alliance partnerships enabled broader market coverage and deeper customer engagement.

Azul’s channel program, PartnerConnect, drove significant growth in FY26, with 50% of business going through channel and alliance partners. Over the past year, the program also achieved 73% growth in strategic VARs and alliances across EMEA, APAC and the Americas, expanding Azul’s global footprint to 346 channel partners.

In FY26, Azul also launched its Managed Services Provider Program for Azul Intelligence Cloud, enabling partners to deliver Java optimization, licensing and security risk assessment and compliance analytics as managed offerings. In addition, Azul invested heavily in the past year with Cloud Service Provider (CSP) co-sell including AWS. 

The company also announced a series of new technology partnerships to deliver integrated solutions that improve developer productivity, DevOps efficiency, business productivity and cloud efficiency for Java customers worldwide. These technology alliance partnerships include:

• Azul and Moderne partner to help Java development teams identify, remove and refactor unused and dead code to boost Java developer productivity and accelerate modernization initiatives.
• Azul and JetBrains collaborate to enhance runtime performance for Kotlin workloads.
•  Azul and Chainguard partner to strengthen container security for Java workloads.
• Azul and RapidFort partner to deliver near-zero CVE enterprise grade Java container images, backed by commercial Java support.
• Azul and CastAI partner to optimize Java workloads for performance and cloud costs, reducing compute waste and cutting infrastructure costs by up to 80%.
• Azul and ActiveViam collaborate to redefine cost optimization for financial analytics in the cloud; the solution leverages CraC functionality in Prime to elastically scale large memory instances and reduce cloud infrastructure costs by 50%.

“FY26 was a defining year for Azul as enterprises increasingly relied on our platform to run Java with greater performance, predictability and cost control in complex, cloud-first environments,” said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO of Azul. “Our momentum reflects strong customer adoption, rapid innovation across our product portfolio and exceptional execution in our go-to-market strategy that positions Azul for continued strong growth and leadership as global enterprises demand best-in-class Java solutions.”