Enterprise Java applications have long powered critical workloads—but many of them remain anchored on-prem. George Gould, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Partner Alliances at Azul, says over 40% of these Java applications remain stuck due to a combination of modernization requirements, staffing constraints, and risk concerns.

“Migrating a Java app often means modernizing it, which means finding developers to retool legacy systems that may not have been touched in years,” Gould notes. “And these are revenue-generating, mission-critical apps—failure isn’t an option.”

To address this, Azul has partnered with Payara to offer a truly codeless lift-and-shift migration strategy. By combining Azul Platform Prime with Payara Qube, organizations can replatform without rewriting—and with confidence.

Azul and Payara’s relationship isn’t new. “We’ve had a six-year OEM partnership,” Gould explains. “Payara’s background is in replatforming J2EE applications, helping enterprises move off WebLogic or IBM WebSphere, which often carry high licensing costs. Our runtime became their default OpenJDK solution for customers needing a secure, well-supported Java base.”

That long-standing trust has translated into real adoption—more than 80% of Payara’s deployments use Azul’s core runtime.

But the benefits go beyond performance or cost reduction. Gould emphasizes three pillars enterprises care about during migration: cost containment, continuous visibility, and—most critically—continuous security.

“Security isn’t a one-time effort in the cloud. You need a mentality of continuous security,” he says. “Azul Intelligence Cloud gives real-time vulnerability information—whether your apps are on-prem, in hybrid cloud, or running across multi-cloud environments.”

The collaboration between Azul and Payara brings together runtime performance, application-level observability, and proactive security—all while removing the friction that typically surrounds Java migration projects.

For enterprises looking to escape the gravity of legacy Java infrastructure without costly rewrites, this partnership could be the cleanest liftoff yet.