Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Azul provides the Java platform for the modern cloud enterprise. Azul is the only company 100 percent focused on Java. Millions of Java developers, hundreds of millions of devices, and the world’s most highly regarded business trust Azul to power their applications with exceptional capabilities, performance, security, value, and success. Azul customers include 36 percent of the Fortune 100, 50 percent of the Forbes Top-Ten World’s Most Valuable Brands, all ten of the world’s top-ten financial trading companies, and leading brands like Avaya, Bazaarvoice, BMW, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Mastercard, Mizuho, Priceline, Salesforce, Software AG, and Workday. The company is the only vendor fully dedicated to Java and the JVM, and the largest provider of commercial support for OpenJDK, supporting more Java versions than any other vendor. It has the largest Java engineering team outside Oracle, delivers Java across more operating systems and platforms than anyone else, and provides rapid, security-only updates for stable deployments. Actively shaping Java’s evolution through the JCP and OpenJDK, it is a leading contributor to security fixes and a pioneer of major innovations like the first pauseless garbage collector, the fastest JIT compiler, and cloud-native compilation, while also fostering the global Java community through initiatives like Foojay.io. Learn more at azul.com

Azul Platform Core: World’s best builds of OpenJDK offering security and cost efficiencies needed to run business-critical, Java-based applications and services – with 70%+ savings compared to Oracle.

Azul Platform Prime: The industry’s fastest OpenJDK-based Java runtime with enhanced JIT compiler, low latency and high-throughput garbage collector, reduced memory and fast startup, all designed to boost speed and scalability of Java deployments and reduce cloud costs by 20%+.

Azul Intelligence Cloud: DevOps analytics solution that provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to boost DevOps productivity.

Azul Zulu Builds of OpenJDK: The most complete, dependable and secure builds of OpenJDK. Zulu builds of OpenJDK are freely available, with 100s of millions of installations across the Java community

Problems Azul Solves:

Cloud Cost Optimization: Technical and business leaders face a paradoxical set of priorities: deliver innovative cloud-based applications while also optimizing infrastructure costs. Unlike other cloud cost tools, Azul solves the problem by improving the performance of Java-based applications and infrastructure. Faster code = less compute = a smaller cloud bill, all while delivering the scale and agility that makes the cloud so attractive in the first place.

Performance-Driven Applications: Azul improves the speed of Java-based infrastructure and applications. With Azul, eCommerce applications deliver a better customer experience for shoppers; financial firms can secure time-sensitive opportunities and execute more effective trades; and gaming applications can service more concurrent users while ensuring greater stability and uptime. Azul ensures applications start fast, stay fast, and run efficiently.

Oracle Licensing: Companies pay too much to run Java and are weighed down by Oracle’s onerous and expensive Java licensing fees. This money is better spent to improve margins or fund innovation. Azul provides a supported, secure, fully compatible Java runtime based on OpenJDK for 70%+ less cost than Oracle.

DevOps Productivity: Businesses are under relentless pressure to speed up application innovation cycles and fortify application security while grappling with resource constraints. Inefficient prioritization of vulnerabilities & tech debt from maintaining unused code wastes effort, hampers agility, and reduces developer productivity. Azul Intelligence Cloud provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to efficiently prioritize vulnerable code for remediation (Vulnerability Detection) and unused code for removal (Code Inventory), dramatically boosting DevOps productivity.

“Now, our engineering team is able to ignore performance maintenance and spend all their time building features. Yet, we’re a thousand times faster than your typical payment transaction or website. Azul Platform Prime is a big part of the reason for this.” Bids Trading

“With Azul Platform Prime, we reduced our front-end server footprint by hundreds of servers and our database server footprint by 50%. This translates into millions of dollars in savings.” Taboola

“Through our strategic partnership with Azul, we significantly reduced our security risk level with our Java applications and Java-based infrastructure, which certainly helps me sleep better at night. In addition, the benefits of switching to Azul Platform Core as our JVM are clear. Our Java estate is now consistent, standardized, easier to maintain, and has brought a level of simplicity that’s a huge benefit to our organization.” Newcastle City Council

“In talking with Azul, the trust came quickly, and was continually reinforced by the excellent support we received. Azul gives us peace of mind.” Curity

“I’m just as enthusiastic today about Azul as when I started out with the product ten years ago as a performance engineer. Azul Platform Prime removes the toil in operations.” Workday

“What we were looking for when we went into partnership with Azul was someone who knew what they were doing in migrating from Oracle Java, who would be able to take on the load, do it with a level of confidence and transparency, and give us the assurance that we’re okay. To get the final verdict from our IT team that said, ‘You’re golden,’ that was a huge sigh of relief.” Ausgrid

Optimizing Java Performance: Azul Systems’ Scott Sellers

Scott Sellers, President, CEO & Co-Founder

With more than 30 years of successful leadership in building high technology companies and delivering advanced products to market, Scott provides the overall strategic leadership and visionary direction for Azul Systems.

Scott has a consistent proven track record of vision, leadership, and success in enterprise, consumer and scientific markets. Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Scott founded 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company that pioneered the 3D graphics market for personal computers and game consoles. Scott served at 3dfx as Vice President of Engineering, CTO and as a member of the board of directors and delivered 7 award-winning products and developed 14 different graphics processors. After a successful initial public offering, 3dfx was later acquired by NVIDIA Corporation.

Prior to 3dfx, Scott was a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, later acquired by MediaVision. Before Pellucid, Scott was a member of the technical staff at Silicon Graphics where he designed high-performance workstations.

Scott graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of science, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Scott has been granted 8 patents in high performance graphics and computing and is a regularly invited keynote speaker at industry conferences.

Gil Tene, CTO & Co-Founder

Gil Tene (Twitter: @giltene) is CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems. He has been involved with virtual machine technologies for the past 20 years and has been building Java technology-based products since 1995. Gil pioneered Azul’s Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4), Java Virtualization, Elastic Memory, and various managed runtime and systems stack technologies that combine to deliver the industry’s most scalable and robust Java platforms. Gil also represents Azul Systems on the JCP (Java Community Process) executive committee.

A frequent speaker and JavaOne “RockStar”, in September 2013 Gil was named “JCP member/participant of the year” at an awards ceremony at JavaOne. In December 2017 he was named a Java Champion, and in 2006 he was named one of the Top 50 Agenda Setters in the technology industry by Silicon.com.

Prior to co-founding Azul, Gil held key technology positions at Nortel Networks, Shasta Networks and at Check Point Software Technologies, where he delivered several industry-leading traffic management solutions including the industry’s first Firewall-1 based security appliance. He architected operating systems for Stratus Computer, clustering solutions at Qualix/Legato, and served as an officer in the Israeli Navy Computer R and D unit.

Gil holds a BSEE from The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and has been awarded over 40 patents in computer-related technologies.

Peter Maloney, CFO & COO

Peter has more than 25 years of strategic financial management and business leadership accomplishments including 19 years of executive leadership for Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. Peter’s experience includes public and private companies, equity and debt financings, corporate development, buy-side and sell-side M&A, strategic and financial planning, investor relations, risk and balance sheet management, and driving sustained profitable growth.

Prior to Azul, Peter was CFO at Jobvite responsible for leading business and financial strategy. Before Jobvite, Peter was CFO at E2OPEN (NASDAQ: EOPN), where he led E2OPEN’s successful IPO, follow-on offering, and sale of the company. Prior to E2open, Peter was CFO at SNOCAP, where he was responsible for all corporate finance, administrative operations, strategic development, and customer care functions. Peter co-led the successful sale of SNOCAP. Before SNOCAP, Peter served as CFO for Keynote Systems (NASDAQ: KEYN), where he directed financial strategy and performance, and completed eleven acquisitions and two tender offers.

Prior to Keynote Systems, Peter held senior financial management positions at Adaptive Broadband, Republic Industries, Dole Food Company and Arthur Andersen. Peter is a Certified Public Accountant, holds an MBA in Corporate Finance from USC’s Marshall School of Business, and a BBA in Economics from Temple University’s Fox School of Business.

Ian Whiting, Chief Revenue Officer

Ian is responsible for all aspects of Azul’s revenue including sales, presales, channel and professional services.

Ian brings immense experience leading companies through rapid revenue growth and successful outcomes. Whiting comes to Azul from Silver Peak Systems (acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise), where he ran global field operations. Prior to that, Ian led global sales at Ruckus Wireless (acquired by Brocade), Fusion-IO (acquired by SanDisk) and Riverbed. At Brocade, Ian was responsible for worldwide sales and marketing, and over his 11 years there helped grow the business to over $2.3b in revenue.
Ian was born in Oxford England and grew up west of London in Reading. He went to the University of Swansea in Wales where he graduated with a BA Honors degree in French and German. He completed his master’s degree in European Business Management at Cranfield University in Bedford, England.

Ian is a life-long Manchester United fan and longtime season ticket holder at the San Jose Sharks NHL team (it’s been a rough few years!) He enjoys golf, reading, walking Klaus, his German Shepherd, and listening to music (think Red Hot Chili Peppers).

Andrew Savitz, CMO

Andrew leads all of Azul’s global marketing initiatives, including core marketing disciplines, product management, community and evangelism.

Andrew has over 20 years in high-growth enterprise software and SaaS companies. As the head of marketing, he’s helped lead the growth of salesforce.com’s largest product line; the successful acquisition of KXEN by SAP; the IPO of Aconex, Australia’s largest tech company; the rapid growth of AppDynamics and the company’s integration into Cisco; and BetterCloud’s game-changing launch of the #SaaSOps movement.

Andy holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science and an MBA from UCLA.

When he’s not at work, he loves spending time with his family, surfing, traveling internationally, digging up trouble with his golden retriever, and bolstering his Yelp Elite status reviewing Mexican restaurants and other awesome dining experiences in Marin.

Martin Van Ryswyk, Chief Product Officer

Martin oversees Azul’s strategic product direction including product innovation, design, and development.

Martin brings more than 30 years of experience leading product and engineering teams to bring innovative enterprise-grade products to market across a variety of markets. He joins Azul as CPO from Planet Labs, where he introduced self-service satellite tasking via a SaaS platform. Prior to Planet, Van Ryswyk was executive vice president of product management and engineering at DataStax, the company behind Apache Cassandra, where his teams delivered pioneering big data products to thousands of enterprise customers worldwide and helped steer the company through rapid growth.

Martin has a degree in Computer Science from UC Davis, where he met his wife. Aside from spending time with his wife and two adult children, Martin has a passion for coding, which he learned as a child on his Radio Shack TRS-80, and aviation which remains an active hobby outside of work.

Azul’s Simon Taylor Named 2025 CRN® Channel Chief: Azul, the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Simon Taylor, Azul’s vice president of Global Partners and Alliances, to its prestigious 2025 Channel Chiefs list. The annual list recognizes IT channel vendor and distribution executives who drive strategy and set the channel agenda for their companies (Read).

Azul Report Finds 83% of CIOs are Spending More on their Cloud Infrastructure and Applications Than Anticipated, While Only 2% Are Under Budget: While leadership recognizes the cloud’s transformative potential and the cost savings it can deliver, the pressure to control expenses is rising. 43% say their CEOs and/or board of directors have concerns about their company’s cloud spend, broken down as follows: 27% said their CEOs and/or board of directors require favorable market conditions to expand their cloud footprint, 9% are unwilling to approve additional expenses and 5% advocate for reduced cloud spending (Read).

Azul and Chainguard Partner to Strengthen Container Security for Java Workloads: This partnership will unite Azul’s best-in-class commercial support and curated OpenJDK distributions with Chainguard’s world-class Linux distro, software factory and container images. Chainguard will build from source Java container images that incorporate Azul’s commercially supported build of OpenJDK that’s part of Azul Platform Core, enabling enterprises to accelerate developer productivity, eliminate costly engineering toil and harden their software supply chain security (Read).

Payara and Azul Announce Strategic Partnership to Power High-Performance Java Deployments and Codeless Migrations: Payara, provider of fully managed cloud-native solutions for running and managing Java applications and Azul, the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced a strategic partnership to help enterprises modernize their Java applications with a codeless, lift-and-shift migration solution, reducing infrastructure and cloud costs and boosting performance and scalability (Read).

Azul Platform Prime Achieves Historic First with 10,000+ JVMs Collaborating and Sharing Performance Optimizations, Cutting Cloud Costs by More than 20%: Azul, the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced a breakthrough in cloud deployment at scale with Azul Platform Prime, its high-performance Java platform. A leading global enterprise has deployed hundreds of applications and micro-services across more than 10,000 Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) using a single instance of Platform Prime’s Optimizer Hub, a unique capability that allows JVMs to collaborate and share performance optimizations (Read).

Azul Wins Multiple Industry Awards for Platform Prime and Intelligence Cloud Innovation Excellence: The recognition spans prestigious industry programs, including the Stevie International Business Awards, Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence, CRN MidMarket 100, and Tech Ascension DevOps Awards, validating Azul’s innovation across its product portfolio (Read).

Azul Announces Strategic Investment from Thoma Bravo: Azul, the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to receive a majority strategic investment from Thoma Bravo, a leading software investment firm. As part of the transaction, Azul’s existing investors Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital will be reinvesting significant new capital and will retain minority stakes alongside Azul’s employees (Read).

Azul Acquires Payara, Strengthening Leadership in Enterprise Java Solutions: Azul, the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced the acquisition of Payara, a global provider of enterprise-grade solutions for Jakarta EE (Java EE)-based applications and microservices for hybrid and cloud-native deployments. The combination of Azul and Payara addresses some of the most pressing challenges enterprises face today: accelerating application modernization, achieving cloud-native agility, and reducing dependencies on proprietary platforms (Read).

Azul Wins 2025 InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards for Platform Prime and Intelligence Cloud: Selected by InfoWorld editors and reviewers, these awards recognize the best and most innovative products in the IT landscape. This dual recognition underscores Azul’s ability to solve two critical challenges facing enterprises today: spiraling cloud infrastructure costs and the productivity drain caused by inefficiency in DevOps operations (Read).

Azul Systems is backed by a group of well-known private equity and growth investors. In March 2020, Vitruvian Partners led a strategic growth equity investment in Azul, alongside Lead Edge Capital, in a transaction that provided approximately $340 million in total consideration to shareholders; both firms remain minority investors today . More recently, in December 2025, Thoma Bravo completed a majority strategic investment in Azul Systems, with Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital reinvesting and retaining significant minority stakes.