Azul Survey Finds 88% of Enterprises Weighing Alternatives to Oracle Java as Licensing Costs and Rules Shift

Nearly 9 in 10 enterprises that use Oracle Java are considering switching to alternative Java distributions, citing rising costs, a preference for open source, and uncertainty around licensing and pricing changes, according to a new survey sponsored by Java vendor Azul.

Azul's second annual "State of Java" report, based on a survey of 2,039 Java professionals conducted by Dimensional Research, found 88% of Oracle Java users are considering leaving for alternatives, up from 72% in Azul's 2023 survey. The report also found 82% of Oracle Java users expressed concern about Oracle's cost model, a figure Azul said was unchanged from its prior survey.

Among respondents considering a move away from Oracle Java, the most commonly cited reasons were cost (42%), a preference for open source (40%), and Oracle sales tactics (37%), followed by uncertainty from ongoing pricing and licensing changes (36%) and restrictive policies (33%). Respondents could select multiple reasons.

The findings arrive as Java remains a foundation layer inside many organizations. Azul said 99% of respondents used Java in their enterprise environments, and nearly 70% reported that more than half of their applications are built with Java or run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

The survey also points to cloud efficiency challenges that extend beyond licensing. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said Java workloads account for more than half of their cloud compute costs. Seventy-one percent said they have more than 20% unused cloud compute capacity that they are paying for, a sign that organizations are still struggling to match provisioning to demand.

To curb cloud spend, respondents said they are adopting newer compute instances and processors (35%) and turning to high-performance Java Development Kits (24%). Among those using a high-performance JDK, the top reasons were improving application performance and optimizing cloud compute costs, according to the report.

On the engineering side, the survey highlights persistent friction in code management and security triage. Sixty-two percent of respondents said dead or unused code reduces DevOps productivity. Security tooling was another drag: 33% reported their DevOps teams spend more than half their time dealing with false positives from Java-related security vulnerability reports.

The long tail of the Log4j security crisis also remains visible. Forty-nine percent of organizations said they are still seeing Log4j-related vulnerabilities in production, three years after the issue emerged, according to the report.

Java's role in artificial intelligence also featured prominently. Fifty percent of respondents said their organizations use Java to build AI functionality. Azul said that figure exceeded the share of organizations using Python or JavaScript for AI development among those already centered on Java. The shift has infrastructure implications: 72% of respondents expect to increase compute capacity to support Java applications with AI features.

Azul CEO Scott Sellers said the survey shows organizations seeking "cost predictability" and operational efficiency in their Java deployments, including by evaluating Oracle alternatives, tightening cloud usage, and addressing productivity and security bottlenecks.

The report's authors noted that the survey was commissioned by Azul and administered electronically by Dimensional Research, with respondents offered token compensation. Participants included Java professionals with direct or managerial responsibility for Java-based applications and infrastructure across six continents.

Posted by John K. Waters on February 3, 2026