Azul unveils migration services from Oracle Java

Looking to spar with Oracle over enterprise deployments of Java, Azul on October 22 unveiled migration services to help IT teams transition from Oracle’s Java SE (Standard Edition) releases to Azul’s Zulu builds of OpenJDK.

Services offered as part of the program include inventory and usage auditing software as well as application-level testing and verification. The goal is to help organizations move their Java “estate” quickly and securely from Oracle to Azul’s Java. Azul argues that Oracle’s recent licensing and commercial support pricing changes have frustrated users, who are looking for cost-effective, open source alternatives.

Two levels of migration services are available from Azul and its partners:

• Level 1, migration, with a typical scenario involving an organization that wants to migrate directly from Oracle Java to Azul Zulu builds of OpenJDK. A turnkey migration process is offered.
• Level 2, modernization, is a partner-led service for customers who want to modernize applications from older Java versions to more current releases, such as moving from applications based on Java 6 or Java 7 to Java 8 or Java 11, which are long-term support (LTS) releases of the platform.

Azul said it can present significant cost savings over what Oracle offers as far as enterprise support services for standard Java. An annual contract for Azul Zulu Enterprise, for 25 servers and 100 desktops, costs $22,072, for example. For Oracle Java, desktop pricing is $2.50 per user per month, or lower with tiered volume discounts. Oracle’s per-processor pricing for use of Java SE on servers and/or cloud deployments is $25 per month or lower.

The Java products from Azul and Oracle are based on the same underlying source code developed in the OpenJDK project, and they are identical with regard to specification compliance and performance, Azul said. Azul Zulu can be downloaded from the Azul website.