Microsoft Buys jClarity To Boost Java Performance On Azure

Silicon Staff,
cloud security

Acquisition is part of Microsoft’s growing support for open source technologies on Azure, including Linux and Java

Microsoft said on Monday it is planning to acquire London-based jClarity, the leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project, as it looks to boost the performance of Java workloads on Azure, the No. 2 cloud platform worldwide after Amazon Web Services.

The company did not disclose terms of the deal, but noted that its use of Java has grown in recent years to include a number of large-scale deployments, including Azure HDInsight and Minecraft.

Customers such as Adobe, Daimler and Société Générale are now running Java workloads on Azure, Microsoft said.

jClarity was founded in 2012 by Java developers and data scientists with the aim of optimising data-driven Java virtual machine deployments, according to the company.

azure cloud
Open source focus

“With more than half of compute workloads running on Linux, Azure has become a great platform for open source, and that certainly includes Java,” said John Montgomery, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of program management for developer tools and services, in a blog post.

He said the jClarity team would continue to collaborate with OpenJDK and Java developers on the advancement of the platform, while noting that Microsoft has sponsored the AdoptOpenJDK project since June 2018 to help in the development of OpenJDK binaries for platforms including Linux and Windows.

jClarity co-founder and chief executive Martijn Verburg is to become principal engineering group manager of Java at Microsoft.

“Microsoft leads the world in backing developers and their communities, and after speaking to their engineering and programme leadership, it was a no-brainer to enter formal discussions,” said Verberg said in a blog post.

“With the passion and deep expertise of Microsoft’s people, we’ll be able to support the Java ecosystem better than ever before.”

He said jClarity will contact its customers in the coming weeks to advise them on product and support issues going forward.

The company’s clients include BNP Paribas, Kayak, Uber and Intel.