As Java turns 30 this year, its grip on enterprise applications holds firm. The multipurpose programming language has evolved through more than two-dozen iterations, an acquisition by Oracle from Sun Microsystems in 2010 and recent changes in licensing.
Despite its age, Java remains deeply entrenched in business applications, from the web to the cloud.
“Java is like the mortar and the brick walls of the enterprise — it’s just there,” Azul CEO Scott Sellers said. “There are enterprises that don’t use Java, but by and large it’s hard to find one of any kind of reasonable scale that doesn’t.”
The ubiquity of Java is reflected in a January report published by Azul. The Java support service provider commissioned Dimensional Research to survey more than 2,000 developers and found only a few who did not use the coding language.
Nearly 7 in 10 respondents reported more than half of their organization’s applications run on Java. Roughly half are now leveraging the programming language to build AI applications.
High-level decisions about coding protocols fall under the purview of IT executives. Developers express preferences and handle day-to-day programming decisions, but tech leaders allocate budget and provision the necessary tools.
Since the acquisition, enterprises have had two Java procurement options: license the Java toolkit and services for supported versions from Oracle or deploy Java under an open-source license. The choice took on more weight beginning in 2019, when Oracle moved to a subscription support model, and again in 2021 and 2023, as the company made additional changes.
“Since Oracle began aggressively encouraging customers to sign up for the subscription, many customers have opted to replace Oracle Java with one of the free third-party alternatives,” Gartner said in a January report.
Oracle switched subscriptions from a user-based fee structure to a per-employee billing system. The changes, which allowed customers to use the latest Java version free of charge while paying for support on prior versions, confused users, according to the analyst firm.
Gartner expects more than 20% of enterprises using Java to be subject to Oracle audits in 2026 and recommends procurement and vendor management leaders review licensing agreements.
Costly code
Potentially costly vendor audits are on the rise, according to Flexera research. CIOs are leaning on IT asset management teams to avoid noncompliance and leveraging FinOps practices to beef up oversight.
Some companies have shifted from Oracle to open source. Azul’s research found the ratio of Java users on Oracle licenses has come down to roughly 30% from 70% in the last six years. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
In order to avoid a painful audit bill, companies that exit existing licenses are running the equivalent of a virus scan to find rogue copies of Oracle Java in their systems, Sellers said.
Nearly 9 in 10 respondents to the Azul survey said their organization was considering migrating to open-source alternatives, an increase from 7 in 10 who responded similarly to a 2023 Azul survey.
Migration isn’t easy and may not be the best solution, according to Forrester Senior Analyst Andrew Cornwall.
“If everyone at your company was already using and paying for Java licenses, the new license structure wasn’t a big deal and may have even meant savings,” Cornwall said.
The changes had a more adverse impact on large organizations with just a few user groups. “Even the prospect of counting employees was not trivial for enterprises,” Cornwall added.
The difficulty of managing an enterprisewide Java estate is complicated by legacy code, which remains in use alongside more recent versions, and by the cadence of new releases.
Oracle released Java 21, the most recent version with long-term support, in Sept. 2023. The release date for Java 25, the next version with long-term support, is Sept. 2025. Three versions without long-term support will have been released in the interim, according to the company’s Java support roadmap.
Nearly one-quarter of organizations are running Java 8 applications and more than one-third are running Java 17, according to the Azul report. Less than one-third are on the newest supported version of Java, the survey found.
Different versions of the programming language are designed with interoperability in mind. Capability is one of the features that’s sustained Java over three decades.
“They’ve turned Java into a modern programming language with a good developer experience while maintaining most of Java’s compatibility with older versions,” Cornwall said. “Those are significant technical achievements. If it weren’t called ‘Java,’ Java 23 would probably have a mob of fans pushing it as the next hot new language.”
