Microsoft Buys jClarity For Optimizing Java Workloads On Azure

'For us, this is the perfect match,' says John Montgomery, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of program management for developer tools and services. 'The relationship with this team is not new: Since June 2018, Microsoft has sponsored the AdoptOpenJDK project to help build binaries of OpenJDK for different platforms, including Linux and Windows.'

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Microsoft has acquired a London startup billed as the leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project in a bid to increase Java workloads performance on its Azure cloud.

The No. 2 cloud computing provider did not disclose terms for the purchase of jClarity, which was started by Java supporters and data scientists with expertise in data-driven Java virtual machine (JVM) optimizations, according to a company blog post on the acquisition Monday.

“At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community,” John Montgomery, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of program management for developer tools and services, said in the blog post. “In the last few years, Microsoft’s usage of Java has grown and now includes multiple large-scale deployments, such as Azure HDInsight and Minecraft. Additionally, Microsoft customers like Adobe, Daimler and Société Générale have brought their Java production workloads to Azure.”

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A spokesperson for Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said the company wasn’t disclosing terms of the deal and had nothing to share on its road map for jClarity at this time.

Montgomery called jClarity a “perfect match” for Microsoft, which will continue to support jClarity’s contributions to the Java open-source community.

“With more than half of compute workloads running on Linux, Azure has become a great platform for open source, and that certainly includes Java,” Montgomery said. “The jClarity team, with the backing of Microsoft, will continue to collaborate with the OpenJDK community and the Java ecosystem to foster the progress of the platform. The relationship with this team is not new: Since June 2018, Microsoft has sponsored the AdoptOpenJDK project to help build binaries of OpenJDK for different platforms, including Linux and Windows.”

The acquisition is a smart move by Microsoft to get more enterprise workloads onto the Azure cloud, according to analyst Hyoun Park, CEO of technology research firm Amalgam Insights.

“It's a move that all the other cloud vendors should try to emulate, as Java workloads are both mature and often portable to the cloud without major challenges,” he said.

Martijn Verburg, co-founder and CEO of jClarity, is now principal engineering group manager of Java at Microsoft.

jClarity was started in 2012 and has between two and 10 employees, according to its LinkedIn profile. Its products include Censum, which intelligently extracts meaningful answers from the complex Java Garbage Collection sub-system; Censum as a Service, which monitors unlimited JVMs with alerts, live views and analysis; and Illuminate, a performance diagnostic engine to use machine learning to help fix Java issues.

“Microsoft leads the world in backing developers and their communities, and after speaking to their engineering and program leadership, it was a no-brainer to enter formal discussions,” Verburg said in a separate blog post on jClarity’s website Monday. “With the passion and deep expertise of Microsoft’s people, we’ll be able to support the Java ecosystem better than ever before.”

Verburg said jClarity will contact its customers in the coming weeks to guide them on product and support matters. Its customers include BNP Paribas, Kayak, Uber and Intel, according to its website.