Microsoft to Acquire jClarity

Microsoft announced today that it will acquire jClarity to help drive increased performance for Java workloads on Azure.

“Microsoft’s usage of Java has grown in the last few years and now includes multiple large-scale deployments, such as Azure HDInsight and Minecraft,” Microsoft corporate vice president John Montgomery writes. “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.”

According to Microsoft, jClarity is the leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project and a major contributor to open source, and the software giant intends to continue doing both. The jClarity team is comprised of “Java champions and data scientists with proven expertise in data-driven Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimizations,” and they will help teams at Microsoft to leverage advancements in the Java platform.

“Microsoft Azure and jClarity engineers will be working together to make Azure a better platform for our Java customers, and internal teams, improving the experience and performance of the platform for Java developers and end-users,” Montgomery notes.

This is interesting to me on a number of levels, but coincidentally because I just chronicled Microsoft’s early work with Java in the late 1990s and the creation of its Java development environment, called Visual J++. Thanks to a Sun Microsystems lawsuit, Microsoft dropped away from the Java community for the most part after that, though it briefly supported a .NET language called J#. But with Microsoft’s more recent moves to embrace open source and its one-time competitors, it looks like they’re back. Indeed, Microsoft has sponsored the AdoptOpenJDK project to help build binaries of OpenJDK for different platforms, including Linux and Windows since June 2018. It’s a new world.