Azul Systems, Inc., an independent provider of Java solutions, is increasing its support for Java-based enterprises in the Philippines, according to its chief executive officer and co-founder on Monday.

Azul CEO Scott Sellers said that the optimization of cloud spending and security by companies is essential as security demand increases and major competitors like Oracle become aggressive with customer audits.

“In the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, we are seeing born-in-the-cloud local companies starting to emerge,” Mr. Sellers told reporters during a briefing.

“We feel that these are areas where US and European organizations are beginning to optimize their Java,” he added.

Revenues from the Philippine public cloud market are projected to grow to over $1 billion this year and about $2.28 billion by 2028, according to Statista.

“Java is very big here. We can significantly reduce the infrastructure required to run the same environment,” Dean Vaughan, Azul vice president, said about Java’s OpenJDK, the free open-source platform on which many web and mobile applications run.

“The challenge now is the increasing cost of cloud,” Mr. Sellers said, citing a 2021 study from Gartner that showed organizations with little or no cloud cost optimization overspent by up to 70% without deriving the expected value.

Oracle, a major licensor of Java, introduced a price increase through its new per-employee universal subscription model in January. This means that the license it grants to organizations is now based on the employee count.

The new model is two to ten times more expensive than the previous one, according to Gartner and Azul estimates.

In Gartner’s Realize Cost Savings After Migrating to the Cloud report, the firm has expected a more than 15% increase in Java applications on third-party Java runtimes in 2026 from the 65% recorded this year.

Compared to Oracle Java Standard Edition, Azul claims to provide an average practical response time of eight minutes per ticket, offering 70% in typical savings through its Platform Prime runtime, alongside commercial support, vulnerability detection, and code maintenance.

It also supports business applications running on the latest 21st Java SE, all the way from the sixth and seventh versions, which are still in production use, Mr. Sellers noted.

“We are excited about the market opportunity to present a superior Java alternative in the Philippines,” Mr. Vaughan said, emphasizing making cloud efficiency both accessible and sustainable for businesses.

Azul has over 100 customers in the Asia Pacific region, typically selling to large enterprises, Mr. Sellers said. — Miguel Hanz L. Antivola

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