Sydney, November 2022 — Azul, the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced its first and sole distribution deal in Australia/New Zealand (ANZ) and the ASEAN region with the appointment of NEXTGEN.

The appointment follows the recent expansion of Azul’s global partner program, “Partner with Purpose”. The program provides comprehensive resources that enable channel organisations to solve top-of-mind customer use cases such as cloud cost optimisation, Java licensing alternatives, and application performance enhancement across industries. 

“We’re seeing rapid growth in demand for the Azul Platform in A/NZ and parts of the Asia-Pacific region,” said Dean Vaughan, Azul’s vice president of APAC, a role he took up in August this year.

“Organisations across the region are struggling with out-of-control Java support and cloud costs that eat into their margins and restrict their ability to modernise applications and infrastructure in a dynamic and competitive world,” he adds. 

By some estimates, over $1T of market value is weighed down due to rampant cloud costs. Separately, Gartner® has stated “Organisations with little or no cloud cost optimisation plans rush into cloud technology investments. They end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70% without deriving the expected value from it,” (Gartner, Realize Cost Savings After Migrating to the Cloud, Finance Research Team, April 28, 2021.).

“Rightsizing compute resources is a key component of a cost-efficient cloud strategy. It’s a simple formula – faster apps equals less compute equals a lower cloud bill. Our flagship product, Azul Platform Prime, is ideal for cloud workloads and proven to reduce customers’ cloud costs by up to 50 per cent.” 

Azul and NEXTGEN will work closely together to power hyperscale, performance-driven cloud applications and cost-efficient Java environments.

Azul’s partner program provides partners with a flexible framework for capturing the substantial market opportunity for Java-based solutions. The opportunity for partners to grow their AppDev businesses, working with Azul and NEXTGEN, are substantial. Azul’s recent announcement of Azul Vulnerability Detection, an agentless cloud service that continuously detects vulnerabilities in Java applications in production (with no performance penalties), extends the Azul value proposition to any partners, with customers running Java based applications in production.

“We have world-class sales and technical training curriculum from the leading provider of OpenJDK-based Java runtimes, complete with on-demand videos, new badging and credentialing progression path, and self-paced presentations, amongst a range of substantial resources to enable partner’s success,” adds Vaughan. 

“Together Azul, NEXTGEN and AppDev partners can build a powerful partnership that solves real customer pain points. 

Alongside the appointment of NEXTGEN, Azul is looking to bring on further strategic partners in due course.

“The appointment of NEXTGEN was a priority for the business. With that relationship in place, we will continue to grow the channel and are accepting new partners now. The investments we’ve made and the commitment we have given to the channel is attractive and will take us to the next level,” said Vaughan.

John Pritchard, Head of Digital Enterprise, NEXTGEN, adds, “At NEXTGEN, we’re focused on working with the world's leading enterprise software providers, and as such, we are highly selective about the technology partners we choose to work with. 

“We search for new vendor technologies that complement our existing vendor ecosystems, so we can help our partners in solution selling and differentiating themselves. Azul, the world’s largest 100% Java vendor, is a high growth company with a massive opportunity in the DevSecOps market, and therefore an important vendor partner for NEXTGEN, expanding our DevSecOps offering for our partners and their customers,” Pritchard adds. 

“With Java the #1 language in DevSecOps for almost 30 years, the #1 language for Cloud-native development, the #1 language for security, and with 60 billion active JVMs globally, Azul is a strategic fit for NEXTGEN, with the most performant, secure, and best -value Java available. That in turns makes NEXTGEN the #1 DevSecOps distributor in A/NZ,” he concludes. 

Azul Platform Prime, is the world’s best Java runtime for cloud workloads. It enhances the performance and scalability of Java with a hyper-optimised runtime that ensures consistent response times, reduces system stalls, and delivers better customer experiences, all while requiring far less infrastructure.