Azul Prime delivers 129% ROI & major cloud savings

Azul has published results from a Forrester Total Economic Impact study that modelled the financial returns of using its Azul Prime Java platform. The study reported a 129% return on investment and a net present value of USD $5.7 million over three years.

The analysis drew on interviews with six organisations using the product. Forrester then created a composite organisation to quantify costs and benefits. In the model, the business ran 550 Java applications, with 80% of workloads in the cloud and 20% on premises in data centres. It also assumed an IT organisation with 2,200 developers and 35 performance engineers focused on Java Virtual Machine maintenance.

Forrester estimated USD $10.2 million in risk-adjusted benefits over three years, against USD $4.4 million in costs, with a payback period of under six months.

Cloud savings

A central theme in the study is infrastructure efficiency. The model links Java runtime performance improvements to reduced cloud consumption, with lower CPU utilisation and fewer latency spikes translating into fewer compute instances needed for the same workload.

Interviewees reported cloud cost reductions ranging from 7% to 50%, depending on workload type and environment. For the composite organisation, Forrester quantified nearly USD $4 million in cloud compute savings over three years, attributing it to lower CPU utilisation and fewer required instances.

One interviewee described how operational headroom changed after switching Java runtimes.

"We used to reserve roughly 20% to 30% of CPU capacity to guard against unpredictable JVM behaviour. That extra buffer was necessary just to be safe. But with the move to Azul Prime, we've been able to cut a lot of that reserved CPU capacity, which is a pretty meaningful gain," said a chief information officer at a financial services firm.

The model also included on-premises savings. Forrester calculated USD $523,000 in data centre infrastructure savings over three years, based on reduced server requirements.

Another interviewee pointed to higher density in a private cloud environment as a key economic driver.

"By using Azul Prime in our private cloud, we've been able to reduce costs by about 3x. Its low-latency JVM lets us pack up to three times more customers onto the same machine compared to before, which makes a big difference in efficiency and scalability," said a senior manager for performance, resilience and scalability at a cloud software provider.

Engineering impact

The study also examined the operational workload of Java performance management, describing a shift away from reactive work that can consume performance engineering time, such as responding to application performance issues and outages.

Forrester tied those pressures to mitigating garbage collection disruptions, managing performance volatility, and performing manual runtime tuning. In the model, more stable Java performance reduced alerts and cut the time spent troubleshooting and tuning.

Based on that, the study estimated USD $5.7 million in productivity gains over three years from reallocating performance engineer full-time equivalents to other work. It also cited improved operational stability and more consistent application performance at scale, though these were not separated into an additional quantified line item beyond the labour calculation.

One interviewee described a significant reduction in the number of people focused on JVM operational issues after adopting the product.

"We had 30 to 40 engineers spending about 50% of their time each week just dealing with JVM operational issues. Now, JVM maintenance is handled by a single dedicated team, and it doesn't take much time. Just two engineers manage JVM issues across all services, and they don't even spend all their time on it," said the senior manager for performance, resilience and scalability at a cloud software provider.

Other benefits

Beyond the quantified savings, Forrester listed additional benefits reported by interviewees that it did not include in the financial model. These included improved customer experience through faster transactions, lower latency, and smoother application behaviour, as well as more predictable performance during peak demand.

The analysis also highlighted potential licensing savings for organisations that move away from paid JDK distributions such as Oracle Java, switching instead to Azul Prime and Azul Core. Some interviewees also said they could redeploy savings elsewhere after reducing cloud and infrastructure spend.

Azul presented the study as evidence that JVM efficiency can directly affect cloud bills for Java-heavy organisations.

"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, and free engineering teams to focus on higher-value innovation."

Azul plans to discuss cloud cost management trends and the study findings in a webinar with Forrester Consulting later this month.