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Microsoft buys jClarity to boost Java on Azure

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 20 Aug 2019

Microsoft has acquired jClarity, a company focused on supporting the Java ecosystem, a move which demonstrates more than ever just how far the Seattle-based company has come since going head-to-head with Sun Microsystems over Java and who would control the basic standards used by hundreds of thousands of programmers.

Fast forward 20 years, and Microsoft takes pride in working with and contributing to a wide range of open source projects. In January, the company announced its acquisition of San Francisco-based Citus Data, a leader in the Postgre SQL community.

At that time, Rohan Kumar, corporate VP of Azure Data at Microsoft, was at pains to emphasise Microsoft’s whole-hearted commitment to open source.

Now John Montgomery, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Program Management for Developer Tools and Services has done the same. He said the latest acquisition will enable Microsoft to support jClarity’s continued contributions to open source while driving increased performance for Java workloads on Azure.

Writing in a blog announcing the deal, Montgomery noted that London-based jClarity is a leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project – a project Microsoft has been sponsoring since June 2018 to help build binaries of OpenJDK for different platforms, including Linux and Windows.

“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. With more than half of compute workloads running on Linux, Azure has become a great platform for open source, and that certainly includes Java,” he said.

At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community.

John Montgomery, Microsoft

With the jClarity team made up of JVM experts who have “helped their customers optimize their Java applications while also providing leadership and support within the Java open source community”, Montgomery is confident that they will help teams at Microsoft to leverage advances in the Java platform.

“At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community. 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,” he added.

JClarity CEO Martijn Verberg was clearly delighted at now being part of the Microsoft family. Now the Principal Engineering Group Manager (Java) at Microsoft, he noted in a statement that it had always been jClarity’s core mission to support the Java ecosystem. With Microsoft “lead(ing) the world in backing developers and their communities”, entering into acquisition discussion had been a “no brainer”.

While jClarity would be focusing on bringing its expertise in Java, Open JD and performance tuning to Java workloads for Microsoft’s customers and support other services such as Azure HDInsights and Microsoft affiliated organisations such as Minecraft, Verberg assured the open source community that the jClarity team would continue to work out in the open with various Java communities.

“With Microsoft’s support, we anticipate being able to contribute back in new and exciting ways,” he said, adding that they would also be working with Microsoft’s Azure engineers to make Azure “a better platform for Microsoft’s Java customers, developers and end-users.”

 

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