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July 29, 2020

Taboola, the Leading Digital Advertising Platform, Switches from Oracle to Azul Java for Superior Performance, TCO & Support

SUNNYVALE, Calif., – Azul, provider of the world’s most trusted open source Java platform, today announced that Taboola, the world’s leading online advertising platform, will be featured in Azul’s new Voice of the Customer Program. Ariel Pisetzky, vice president of IT at Taboola, will explain why their explosive growth drove the switch to Azul in a webinar entitled “Why Taboola switched from Oracle Java to Azul” on Wednesday, August 5, 8:30 a.m. PST. Register here for the webinar.

An epic shift is underway in the world of Java and thousands of companies like Taboola are faced with a serious choice: stay with Oracle or switch?  Mr. Pisetzky will provide a background of Taboola’s web-intensive business and discuss why switching to Azul’s Zing Java runtime was essential to fueling the rapid growth of its online advertising platform, used by over 20,000 companies to reach over 1.4 billion people each month. Pisetzky will discuss how Azul Zing powers Taboola’s Cassandra and Hadoop-based big data infrastructure as well as the technical and business impacts of working with Azul.

“We chose Azul for a combination of superior performance, stability, security, memory utilization, ease of use, and the transparency and ease of working with Azul,” said Pisetzky.

“For example, Azul Zing performance is so superior,” he continued, “that we’re now doing things with our big data system that cannot be done without Azul. We’re able to have humongous heap monoliths managed with Azul. We use Apache Cassandra, which recommends nodes with only a terabyte of data; but we’re pushing nodes with 10 TBs of data densities and still achieving the performance we need. Same for NameNodes in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). In short, we’re achieving unobtainable technical feats with Azul Zing that you can’t achieve using plain vanilla Java. And this performance translates into huge infrastructure savings and simplification by having less servers. With Azul, we were able to reduce our front-end server footprint by more than 30%, which is hundreds of servers, and our database server footprint by about 50%.

“That’s why Azul is famous across our company,” added Pisetzky. “We have hundreds of developers working at Taboola, and 30 in pure production SE, and Azul is a household name with them all, not only the version but also the flavor, because of how mission-critical it is.”

Many companies like Taboola are discovering that Azul is the best-kept secret in Java. It is the largest company 100% focused on Java and the JVM and has the second-largest Java engineering team after Oracle. These engineers, some of whom have been involved with Java from its beginning 25 years ago, are deeply engaged with the open source and Java communities. Azul is part of the JCP Executive Committee which drives Java’s future; a member of the OpenJDK Vulnerability Group ensuring the coordinated release of security updates, and a member of the Java Experts Group deciding the new features for each release of the Java language and runtime.

Azul has been shipping enterprise Java products for over 15 years which today are used by 26% of the Fortune 500, hundreds of thousands of Java developers, and millions of connected devices. In addition to Zing, Azul also offers Zulu, a 100% open source, fully standards-compliant Java Development Kit (JDK) and runtime platform, in both Enterprise and Embedded editions. Azul customers reduce Java TCO as much as 90%, enjoy the industry’s best support, and can improve performance both through Zing’s power and Azul’s responsiveness, meaning that customers get help quickly whenever they need it from knowledgeable support engineers.

“As Oracle continues to raise costs for Java customers, many of those same customers, like Taboola, have discovered major infrastructure cost savings, superior performance and scalability, and best-in-class support by working with Azul,” said Scott Sellers, Azul president and CEO. “Our webinar with Taboola will provide compelling insights into what’s going on in the Java world today and the choices that many Java shops are facing. Most importantly, it will show how companies that switch to Azul can turbocharge their Java-based businesses.”

“Azul’s support is a real competitive advantage,” said Pisetzky. “We love working with Azul, it’s a good vibe and a true partnership. Our success is important to the Azul team. We never feel like we’re pushed into a corner. When we have questions, we get answers. And when we need help, we get exceptional support.”

Azul Systems

Azul is the largest company 100% focused on Java and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), providing the world’s most trusted open source Java enterprise platform. Azul’s Java runtimes power Microsoft Azure; the cloud infrastructure of companies like Bazaarvoice, Priceline, and Workday; and the operations and products of Avaya, BMW, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Mastercard, Mizuho, and Software AG. Azul’s customers include 26% of the Fortune 500, 50% of Forbes Top 10 World’s Most Valuable Brands, and all 10 of the world’s Top 10 financial trading companies. Azul solutions are available for developers, ISVs, enterprises with on-prem and cloud deployments, as well as for OEMs building embedded and IoT devices. Visit azul.com and follow us on Twitter @azulsystems. 

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