The University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) has switched to Azul Platform Core, enabling the institution to avoid a potential 60% rise in annual licensing costs.
“A 60% license cost increase just didn’t sit well with us,” says Andrew Yong, manager of enterprise applications at UniSQ. “There are countless ways we could use those funds to support our students.”
UniSQ needed a simpler, more transparent solution that could scale affordably and be trusted across a wide range of campus systems, from development environments to legacy desktop applications.
The university considered a free distribution of OpenJDK, the open-source version of Java – which comes without support – but determined that expert third-party support would be necessary to ensure a smooth migration, proper management of security updates, and professional help in troubleshooting and problem-solving issues going forward.
The university said Azul offered the same functions but at typically 70% less cost. Just as important was the fact that Azul provided equivalent service offerings, which meant that UniSQ didn’t need to change its existing JDK upgrade/patching processes.
Working closely with Azul’s client services team, UniSQ executed a seamless migration in only two weeks.
Instead of pursuing a complex replacement and removal strategy for Oracle Java, the team decided to block future downloads of Oracle Java at their firewall, which allowed them to phase in Azul Platform Core with minimal disruption and assure that they do not introduce unlicensed versions of Oracle Java into their environment. Trusted advisory support from Azul helped ensure that UniSQ’s Oracle implementation, as well as other essential Java-based applications, continue to function as needed.
