Scott Sellers waited his turn, and when it came up, he knew just what to do. The Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Azul Systems, a company that develops and distributes runtimes for executing Java-based applications, was the backup quarterback on the Princeton University football team behind Jason Garrett, who would play in the NFL and eventually serve as the head coach for the Dallas Cowboys for a decade.
After college, Sellers worked for Silicon Graphics before Co-Founding 3dfx Interactive, which would later be sold to Nvidia. He was looking for a new project when he was introduced to Gil Tene and Shyam Pillalamarri, at which point the trio realized they were, effectively, singing the same tune. “The three of us recognized that we could develop innovative products specifically for enterprise Java use cases,” Sellers said. “We felt that we could build a microprocessor that was incredibly efficient at running Java with some hooks built into that hardware that would make the pains of Java go away.”
Fast-forward to today, and Azul is firing on all cylinders, not leastwise because Oracle instituted a monthly licensing fee for Java SE this January that soured many longtime customers on Larry Ellison’s company. “This is really where Azul comes into play,” Sellers said, “and our product platform core is a true drop-in replacement for Oracle. Ours, of course, is pure open source, whereas Oracle's is commercially licensed, so economically ours is much more affordable.”
By late April, Azul had seen so many changeovers that it introduced JVM Inventory, a feature of its intelligence cloud designed specifically for those migrating to the company from Oracle. But the product wasn’t simply opportunistic; Sellers doesn’t want Azul to be a revolving door, but a longtime home. “We’re not only simplifying Oracle Java migrations,” he said, “we’re also helping organizations take control of their Java subscription costs, reduce audit risk and ensure long-term compliance.”
Always looking to the future: that’s the backup quarterback’s true talent. But Sellers isn’t anybody’s backup anymore.
