SINGAPORE, June 27, 2026 – As artificial intelligence, digital payments and cloud-based services expand across Asia, enterprises are facing a common challenge: how to process more data and support more users without allowing infrastructure costs to rise at the same pace.
Simon Ritter, Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Azul, believes high-performance Java platforms can help businesses improve application speed, reduce cloud resource requirements and make better use of existing computing capacity.
Speaking to AsiaBizToday during a recent visit to Singapore, Ritter said infrastructure optimisation is becoming increasingly important as enterprises move AI and other digital initiatives into production.
“If you talk to any CIO or CFO, their main concern is how to reduce costs because they want to deliver these AI capabilities, but they don’t want to increase the cost dramatically,” Ritter said.
This creates a direct return-on-investment question for organisations. They may see the strategic value of AI, but deployments become harder to justify if every new capability requires significantly more cloud compute, larger clusters and higher operating expenditure.
Cloud Economics Become Central to Enterprise AI
Azul provides high-performance Java runtime technology designed to improve latency and throughput. Ritter said this can help organisations run applications on fewer or smaller cloud instances. “If you’re running a large cluster of nodes to deliver something like Kafka functionality, you can use a high-performance JVM and do more with less,” he said. “That means provisioning smaller instances in the cloud or fewer instances in your cluster, and that leads to a very quick cost saving.”
The pressure to optimise is increasing because AI interfaces can generate more requests to the enterprise systems sitting behind them. Each query may trigger searches across databases, ERP platforms, CRM systems and transaction-processing environments. As usage rises, businesses need to ensure the infrastructure can handle additional workloads without becoming prohibitively expensive.
Azul is also working on cloud-focused Java technologies intended to address some of the inefficiencies associated with modern application architectures. One area involves separating the just-in-time compiler from the Java Virtual Machine so that compilation can be managed centrally and more efficiently.
Another is a project known as CRaC, or Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint, which enables a running application to resume quickly from a previously saved state.
This is particularly relevant in microservices environments. Companies often divide large applications into small services that can be scaled independently. If one service experiences a demand spike, organisations can create additional instances of that component.
However, Java instances may take time to become fully operational. To avoid delays, companies sometimes keep unused services running in the background.
Ritter said this wastes compute resources because the instances consume capacity while doing little or no useful work.
Faster restoration would allow companies to activate services when required and shut them down afterwards, making cloud infrastructure more responsive and efficient.
Asia’s Payments and Financial Systems Drive Demand
The discussion highlighted Asia’s digital payments and financial services sectors as major areas of opportunity for high-performance Java. Markets such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines are rapidly expanding domestic digital payment systems and moving towards less cash-dependent economies.
These environments require platforms that can process high transaction volumes, maintain low latency and operate with strong reliability. Java is already widely used in payment-processing systems, while high-performance runtime technology can help reduce the time needed to process transactions.
The same considerations apply to digital asset platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges and financial trading systems. In these sectors, even small improvements in latency can have significant financial value.
Fraud detection is another important use case. Effective fraud monitoring depends on analysing large volumes of transaction data and detecting unusual patterns quickly.
Ritter said Azul can support individual Java instances with very large memory capacities, reducing the need to divide data into multiple smaller groups.
“One of the things that we can do is scale a single instance up to something like 20 terabytes of memory,” he said. “You can put it all in one lump in memory and do the processing much more quickly.”
This can simplify system architecture and help organisations identify potentially fraudulent activity more rapidly.
Financial services are therefore a particularly important sector for Azul because performance, reliability and security are central to the way these businesses operate.
India as a Development Hub and Growth Market
India plays a significant role in Azul’s operations. The company has maintained a development presence in Bengaluru for many years, with teams involved in engineering, quality assurance and customer support.
The support function contributes to Azul’s global follow-the-sun model, allowing customers in Asia and other regions to receive assistance across time zones.
Azul also has commercial operations in India and has been expanding its customer-facing teams. The voice-note discussion identified financial services, digital payments, cloud adoption and consumer technology as major areas of opportunity in the Indian market.
India’s rapid expansion in digital commerce and payment processing aligns closely with Azul’s focus on performance and cost optimisation.
The country is also home to fast-growing consumer technology platforms, including quick-commerce and e-commerce companies that need to process large numbers of transactions while maintaining responsiveness.
Having engineering teams in Bengaluru also gives Azul closer access to customers operating these services. The discussion noted that engineers can engage directly with customers, understand performance challenges and use that feedback to influence product development.
This makes India both an operational centre and an important source of market insight.
OpenJDK Alternatives Reshape the Java Market
Another major theme is the changing market for Java distributions. Java is developed through the open-source OpenJDK project, but enterprises typically use packaged distributions maintained by specialist providers.
Ritter compared the model with Linux. Organisations generally do not download Linux source code, build every component and assemble their own operating system. Instead, they use distributions such as Red Hat, Ubuntu or SUSE.
Java works in a similar way.
Oracle was historically the default provider for many enterprises. However, changes to Oracle’s licensing and pricing model have encouraged organisations to evaluate alternative OpenJDK distributions from providers including Azul, Amazon and Microsoft.
Ritter emphasised that Java has a formal specification and compatibility-testing process. A distribution must pass an extensive suite of tests before it can be recognised as a compatible Java implementation.
This means organisations can move between compliant distributions without rewriting or recompiling their applications.
“If you take Oracle Java, run your application on it, then move to Azul and run your application, it will work in exactly the same way,” Ritter said. “They’re functionally identical because they are built from the same source code and tested to make sure everything works as it should.”
For large banks and other regulated organisations, this portability can create opportunities to reduce software costs while retaining compatibility and support. The supplementary discussion also referred to Azul’s work with a major Indian regulator around the recognition of compliant OpenJDK distributions within technical guidelines.
The issue arose because some existing standards referred too narrowly to a single implementation, potentially creating high software costs for regulated institutions. Broader recognition of standards-compliant Java distributions could give enterprises greater flexibility in selecting supported platforms.
Performance Matters Beyond the Cloud
Although cloud cost reduction is a major priority, Azul’s technology is also relevant to organisations that operate their own private cloud or on-premises infrastructure. Some companies may prefer to retain direct control over infrastructure for regulatory, security or commercial reasons.
In these cases, improving the efficiency of applications can free up computing capacity and reduce the need to purchase additional hardware.
This is becoming increasingly important as AI-related demand places pressure on the availability and cost of computing resources.
If enterprises can increase the utilisation of their existing systems, they may be able to support new AI workloads without making equivalent investments in new infrastructure. The broader opportunity is therefore not limited to faster applications. It is about improving the economics of digital operations.
AI Growth Makes Back-End Efficiency More Important
Much of the AI industry’s attention is directed towards chips, foundation models and user-facing applications. But the expansion of AI also increases demand on existing enterprise infrastructure.
Every AI-powered query, automated workflow or intelligent agent may require interaction with databases, payment systems, business applications and other back-end platforms. That means performance improvements at the Java runtime level can affect the cost and responsiveness of AI-enabled services.
For Asian enterprises, this is particularly relevant because many markets are simultaneously expanding digital payments, e-commerce, financial technology and cloud infrastructure.
The result is rising demand for systems that can process more work while consuming fewer resources. Ritter’s view is that this combination of performance and efficiency will become increasingly important as organisations scale AI and digital services.
The technology companies that attract the most attention may be those building models and chips. But the ability to deploy those capabilities economically will depend heavily on the efficiency of the software and infrastructure underneath them.
For Azul, that creates an opportunity to position high-performance Java not simply as a developer technology, but as a tool for cloud cost control, financial infrastructure and scalable digital growth across Asia.