Microsoft has acquired London-based JClarity in an effort to bolster the performance of Java workloads on Azure. John Montgomery, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of programme management for developer tools and services said that the deal would help the company to strengthen its Azure cloud computing platform by enhancing the performance of Java workloads.
“The team, formed by Java champions and data scientists with proven expertise in data-driven Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimisations, will help teams at Microsoft to leverage advancements in the Java platform,” Montgomery wrote.
“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 terms of the deal were not disclosed by Microsoft. The company also stated that it had no other information to share at this time regarding its road-map for jClarity.
In recent years, Microsoft has seen a constant growth in usage of Java on Azure, which now includes several large-scale deployments, such as Azure Minecraft and HDInsight. In addition, many of Microsoft’s customers, such as Daimler and Adobe, have also shifted their Java production workloads to Azure.
Microsoft believes that by adding jClarity’s team and toolset, it will be better able to serve those Java customers.
jClarity was founded by Martijn Verburg, Ben Evans and Kirk Pepperdine in 2012 and currently has a staff of about 10. Some of its main products, which focus on identifying performance issues in cloud and on-premises Java applications, include Censum, Censum-as-a-Service, and Illuminate. The company uses machine learning to identify memory leaks in its Censum tool. It also offers commercial support for AdoptOpenJDK binaries.
Microsoft and JClarity were not strangers prior to the deal. Since June 2018, Microsoft has been a part of the AdoptOpenJDK project, along with other enterprise firms, including IBM, Red Hat, Amazon, Pivotal, and SAP. The aim of the project is to help create binaries of OpenJDK – an open-source implementation of Java Platform Standard Edition — for platforms like Windows and Linux.
Recently, Microsoft also participated in a project to develop a Java installer for its Visual Studio Code lightweight code editor.
Former jClarity CEO Martijn Verburg, who is now principal engineering group manager for Java at Microsoft – is excited with the deal with 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,”
“We look forward to working with Microsoft Azure engineers to make Azure a better platform for Microsoft’s Java customers, developers and end-users,”
