Since the announcement of the change to Oracle’s Java licensing, enterprises have been moving to alternative providers that offer similar services at a lower cost.
To add to that, cloud providers like Alibaba Cloud and Tencent are raising their cloud and AI service rates to keep up with global AI demand, resulting in significant increases in the procurement costs of core hardware for companies adopting AI initiatives as well as modernising their most critical business applications.
With the growing adoption of AI and rapidly rising prices for compute resources, the pressure to reduce cloud costs is only mounting. Yet, despite taking measures to reduce their public cloud costs, many enterprises still struggle with increasing infrastructure fleets as they infuse AI capabilities into their applications, as well as significant waste in how they allocate their cloud resources.
In Azul’s 2026 State of Java Survey & Report, 67% of companies in Southeast Asia reported more than 20% unused compute capacity in their public cloud environments, a strong indicator that many overprovision to compensate for inconsistent or unpredictable runtime behaviour, slow start-up times, and prolonged warm-up cycles.
While Java has long been widely used in enterprise applications, organisations are increasingly examining its impact on infrastructure efficiency and costs.
Cloud cost reduction can also be influenced by how efficiently Java applications are run. According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by Azul, organisations that migrated Java applications and services to a higher-performance Java platform reported cloud cost savings of up to 50%.
Java performance and cloud costs
One approach for enterprises looking to reduce compute costs and improve efficiency in Java and JVM-based applications is to run them on a high-performance Java platform.
Organisations get more bang for their buck when they implement a high-performance Java platform for small to large Java application deployments by raising target utilisation levels and reducing overprovisioning.
Enterprises may see improved customer experience through faster transactions, lower latency, and smoother application behaviour when they enhance Java performance.
More stable and predictable application performance during periods of peak demand may also reduce the operational effort associated with JVM performance management and troubleshooting.
Optimising Java performance goes beyond technical upgrades. It can help organisations reduce cloud costs, improve operational efficiency, and support the scaling of enterprise workloads. Any resulting cost savings may also be redirected to other business priorities.
The enterprise impact of Java performance
Migrating workloads to a high-performance Java platform can reduce CPU utilisation and latency spikes, which may lower cloud and infrastructure costs as fewer resources are required to process the same workload.
In the 2026 State of Java Survey & Report, 50% of Southeast Asian companies cited the use of a high-performance Java platform as one of their main strategies for addressing high cloud costs.
Organisations typically add extra horsepower to an application’s deployment in a cloud environment to ensure operations run smoothly. However, 68% of organisations in Southeast Asia report more than 20% of unused compute capacity in their public cloud environments.
With a high-performance Java platform, enterprises may be able to reduce overprovisioning of Java resources by monitoring actual JVM utilisation rather than allocating excess capacity for “just in case” scenarios.
In addition, the Forrester TEI Report found that more stable and predictable Java performance reduced the operational burden on performance engineering teams by reducing the time spent on troubleshooting and performance tuning.
By optimising JVM performance, enterprises can also reallocate engineers from routine maintenance to higher-value work, driving productivity gains and enabling teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
While enterprises need software that is robust, reliable, secure, and scalable to keep up with the surging demands of AI infrastructure and workloads, cloud costs have to be kept in check to keep a business running.
For Southeast Asian organisations, improving Java performance is one approach that may help reduce cloud costs.
