Study finds organisations achieved 129% ROI with Azul Prime

Azul have announced the results of its new Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study. The commissioned study found organisations using Azul Prime saw a 129% ROI and a $5.7 million NPV over three years. The study examined the potential financial impact of Prime as cloud spend has exploded over the past several years.

In 2024, 74% of cloud decision-makers said that their organisation has either adopted or plans to adopt a FinOps practice in the next 12 months. These organisations are actively scrutinising their public and private cloud spend and seeking ways to optimise or reduce it. Many enterprises are investigating Java infrastructure, including the Java virtual machine (JVM), as a lever for cost savings.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with Azul investment, Forrester interviewed six decision-makers with experience using Prime. The company aggregated the results into a composite organisation running 550 Java applications.

80% of those Java platforms were run in the cloud and 20% on-premises in data centres. The composite IT team includes 2,200 developers and 35 performance engineers dedicated to Java Virtual Machine (JVM) maintenance.

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value quantified benefits for the composite organisation include:

• Reduction in cloud computing expenses. Following the deployment of Prime, the composite organisation required fewer compute instances to support its Java applications, attributable to enhanced JVM performance and decreased CPU utilization. With approximately 80% of Java applications operating in the cloud, these improvements yielded a nearly $4 million reduction in cloud computing costs over three years.
• Data centre infrastructure costs dropped as optimised JVM performance allowed the organisation to run Java applications with fewer instances and servers. With 20% of Java workloads on-premises, this saved $523,000 over three years.
• Prime improved Java performance stability and predictability, reducing troubleshooting time for engineers and enabling reallocation to higher-value tasks. This efficiency generated $5.7 million in value over three years.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits providing value for the composite organisation but are not quantified for this study include:

• Impact on customer experience. Prime’s improvement in Java runtime and performance improves customer experience for the composite organisation. Faster transactions, smoother interactions, and decreased wait times all result from the improved application performance from Prime.
• Prior JDK license cost savings for switching to both Azul Prime and Azul Core. Licensing fees savings for the composite organization are possible for the prior JDK if it switches to Prime and to Azul’s Core product. Azul Core is an OpenJDK product line for applications that are not performance sensitive or that drive high cloud costs and don’t require Azul Prime. The combined switch enables license savings if the composite organization migrates all its Java infrastructure off its prior paid JDK.

Reductions in cloud and infrastructure costs

The study found improved Java performance enabled organisations to run workloads more efficiently, reducing the number of compute instances required. As a result, this reduced cloud and infrastructure spend. When running Java applications on Prime, the study found it optimises performance and reduces CPU utilisation and latency spikes. This means that fewer resources were needed to process the same workload.

After interviews, organisations began migrating their Java applications and services to Prime. These organisations saw a reduction in cloud costs, ranging from 7% to 50%, depending on workload type and environment.

Additional quantified benefits for the composite organisation include:

• Nearly $4 million in cloud compute cost savings over three years, driven by lower CPU utilisation and fewer required instances.
• $523K in on-premises data centre infrastructure savings, resulting from reduced server requirements.

Engineering productivity gains drive additional value

Beyond infrastructure savings, the study found that more stable and predictable Java performance significantly reduced the operational burden on performance engineering teams. Before implementing Prime, performance engineers spent a significant amount of time handling application performance issues and outages.

This included mitigating garbage collection (GC)-related disruptions, managing performance volatility and conducting manual runtime tuning. After implementing Prime, the Java performance was more stable and predictable. This resulted in fewer alerts and less time spent troubleshooting and performance tuning.

As a result, the composite organisation achieved:

• $5.7 million in productivity gains from reallocating performance engineer FTEs to higher-value work.
• Improved operational stability and more consistent application performance at scale.

“We believe this independent study by Forrester validates what our customers are consistently telling us about their production environments. Improving Java performance is one of the most effective and often overlooked ways to reduce cloud costs at scale,” said Scott Sellers, Co-Founder and CEO of Azul.

“By addressing JVM efficiency directly, organisations can achieve meaningful infrastructure and cloud cost savings, improve performance consistency and application SLAs. This frees engineering teams to focus on higher-value innovation.”

Enterprise Times: What this means for business

Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study highlights the potential for enterprises looking to optimise their IT investments. Businesses, irrespective of size, sector or geography have to make their investments work for them and drive greater operational efficiency. For organisations running large-scale Java environments, the study demonstrates that adopting Azul Prime can deliver a substantial return on investment.

These results are based on a composite scenario reflecting real-world enterprise use, including hundreds of applications and a sizable developer and engineering team. For businesses, this means that switching to Azul Prime can result in rapid and measurable financial benefits. This includes lower infrastructure and cloud costs due to improved Java performance and reduced need for compute resources.

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