Most organizations still have cold feet over the future of their dependence on Oracle Java, two years after the IT giant made massive revisions to its licensing terms.
According to Azul’s 2025 State of Java survey and report, 82% of organizations had some level of concern around the pricing of Oracle Java following its latest round of pricing changes. Another 88% said they are considering switching from Oracle to an alternative Java provider, up from 72% in 2023.
The survey was administered by market research firm Dimensional Research and queried 2,039 Java professionals across six continents who were offered token compensation in exchange for their participation.
Sticker shock. The findings reflect the lingering effects of the company’s January 2023 move to adopt an “Employee for Java SE Universal Subscription” model, where customers are charged based on the number of employees in their organization. This replaced its previous subscription model, where pricing was based on a per-user and per-processor basis.
Gartner, in a recent report, said that most of its clients deemed the new pricing model two to five times more expensive than Oracle’s previous legacy subscription model. Azul president, co-founder, and CEO Scott Sellers told IT Brew that the change marked a shift away from a traditional “sensical and fair” way of pricing.
“If you have company A that’s 10,000 people and barely uses Java and another company that is exactly the same size, 10,000 employees, and widely uses Java, Oracle charges those companies the same amount of money, which is really nonsensical,” Sellers said.
Making the switch. Scott Rosenberg, president and CEO of Miro Consulting, told IT Brew that the 2023 subscription model change caught organizations off guard as they were presented with new budgeting obligations.
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“It locks enterprises into having to budget for Java in one way, shape, or form, and having to engineer with that in mind whereas before, it was probably an afterthought at best,” he said.
However, Rosenberg said that while organizations may still be feeling sticker shock from the price model change, there is a high switching cost that must be considered when contemplating the decision to migrate to another Java provider.
“This is not one of these easy switches where you say, ‘I want to go from Verizon to T-Mobile,’” he said, adding that companies need to evaluate the pros and cons of switching providers, especially on the security front.
Rosenberg suggested companies on the fence of whether or not they should make a switch in providers should seek the advice of a third-party expert.
“It’s highly likely you don’t have that individual in-house that has…that 10,000 hour rule in this particular subject matter,” he said.
Sellers added that businesses should try to remain open to the idea of such a change and identify where exactly Java is used within their organization.
“That sounds simple, but many of these organizations are quite big and complex and they have all sorts of different application silos and different business units, etc., etc.,” Sellers said. “So, even understanding a basic Java inventory is really important to understand the totality of the problem.”