Azul Gains Momentum in the Financial Services Industry as Top Banks Switch to Azul for Better Java Performance and Support

All 10 of the world’s top 10 trading companies and six of the top 10 US financial companies have switched from Oracle to Azul Java

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Azul, provider of the world’s most trusted open source Java platform, today announced that it continues to gain momentum in the Financial Services industry as a growing number of the world’s top financial institutions replace Oracle Java SE with Azul’s Java platform products.

In the last two quarters, 17 banks (including investment banks, retail banks, commercial banks, and private banks) bought Azul Java support for the first time or extended their contracts. So too did nine buy-side firms (hedge funds, asset managers and boutique traders), seven exchanges, six payments companies, and three brokerage software platforms. Today, Azul customers include all 10 of the world’s top 10 trading companies and six of the top 10 US financial companies (measured by market cap).

“Azul’s superior product performance, cost, and support keeps winning the hearts and minds of CIOs in financial services industries,” said Scott Sellers, Azul co-founder, president and CEO. “When companies switch to Azul, they dramatically reduce their Java infrastructure and support costs, improve key application performance, and enable development teams to focus on innovation rather than troubleshooting. We hear this over and over again, and it’s why we continue to gain momentum across all financial services sectors: retail banking, capital markets, insurance, payments processing, and more.”

A growing number of leading investment banks, hedge funds, exchanges, payments organizations, insurers, multilateral trading facilities, and cryptocurrency providers have switched from Oracle Java SE to Azul Zulu® Builds of OpenJDK for their Java support. Zulu is backed by tough security SLAs and a globally-distributed, highly responsive support team of Java experts and software engineers, frequently achieving a 100% customer satisfaction score. Zulu’s enterprise support plans are priced up to 94% lower than Oracle Java SE subscriptions, making the industry’s best Java support not only superior but more cost-effective as well.

For many companies in the finance industry, an essential key to running a successful Java operation is Azul Zing®, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) hyper-optimized to turbocharge Java performance. Zing is the chosen foundation for mission-critical Java-based trading and risk management for dozens of top banks. Running on Zing, online banking and trading platforms achieve fast, glitch-free performance, often driving down infrastructure costs as much as 50%. A Total Economic Impact Study by Forrester found that Zing pays for itself in less than three months, and over a three-year period delivers a 224% ROI and total benefits of $2.2M.

“There are a few Java Virtual Machines available on the market. The most common and standard one is the Oracle Hotspot JVM,” said Jad Sarmo, Head of Technology at Dsquare Trading Ltd., in a recent Medium article, Why we chose Java for our High-Frequency Trading application. “For very demanding applications, there is a great alternative called Zing, by Azul. Zing is a powerful replacement of the Oracle Hotspot JVM and eliminates the latency issues common in Java.”

In the adjacent world of equities block trade execution, BIDS Trading, operator of the BIDS Alternative Trading System (ATS) has emerged as the largest block-trading ATS by volume in the U.S., and, in October, entered into an agreement with Cboe Global Markets, Inc., to be acquired.

“Part of our secret recipe is Azul Zing,” said Brett Vasconcellos, CTO of BIDS Trading, who has led the way in expanding the use of Zing to drive the company’s Java strategy over the last two years.

“Now, our engineering team is able to ignore performance maintenance and spend all their time building features,” said Vasconcellos. Less than 1% of the company’s developers’ efforts now goes to performance tuning. “Yet, we’re a thousand times faster than your typical payment transaction or website. Zing is a big part of the reason for this.”

To learn more about Azul's offering to financial services companies, please visit: https://www.azul.com/better-java-for-financial-services/

Azul Systems

Azul Systems (Azul) is the largest company 100% focused on Java and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), providing the world’s most trusted open source Java enterprise platform. Azul’s Java runtimes power Microsoft Azure; the cloud infrastructure of companies like Bazaarvoice, Priceline, and Workday; and the operations and products of Avaya, BMW, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Mastercard, Mizuho, and Software AG. Azul’s customers include 27% of the Fortune 100, 50% of Forbes Top 10 World’s Most Valuable Brands, and all 10 of the world’s Top 10 financial trading companies. Azul solutions are available for developers, ISVs, enterprises with on-prem and cloud deployments, as well as for OEMs building embedded and IoT devices. Visit azul.com and follow us on Twitter @azulsystems.