Azul channel and alliances lead on its new Technology Alliance Partner Program

Simon Taylor discusses how this new program brings more collaboration for its ISVs.

Java runtime solutions provider Azul has relaunched its Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program to bring more collaboration and co-creation for its ISVs.

The TAP program provides a formal framework for joint technical integrations, solution development, and go-to-market activities between Azul and its alliance partners.

Simon Taylor, Channel and Alliances lead at Azul spoke to CRN Australia about the refreshed program and why they relaunched it.

The TAP program has been running for the past three years, but over the past 10 months, the software platform has been looking for strategic partners that can align with them.

With the new program, Taylor said there are not a lot of organisations that the company can “broaden their reach to”.

“We're creating a community of licensing and modernisation solutions in the Java world, and that ties in very nicely with Java being 30 years old this year,” he explained.

“When you've got 25 percent of organisations still having all their core business applications in Java, and now people are writing AI applications in Java. You know, this is a high-performance business application solution, environment that is standing the test of time.”

Prior to the relaunch, partners could buy and download Azul’s binaries, the company would test it, and they would be good to go. Now with this new program, Azul is much more hands on.

“It's a bit like the modern structure approaches you get with Veeam or ServiceNow,” Taylor explained.

“We are onboarding them, we're working with them, the engineering teams are collaborating, we're working out co-sell with them. We're swapping information around which customers that we're working with together, and then we're collaborating on how we go to market.”

The TAP brings advanced collaboration and onboarding for ISVs removing the rigmarole between, vendor, customer and ISV.

On top of that, they now bring that advanced collaboration to other channels like resellers and distributors. Taylor noted this is where Azul’s recent acquisition of Payara has been “useful”.

“We've created the alliances and we're propelling those into our channel, VAR distribution and extended reach model, so they can take that collaboration,” he said.

“Value added resellers love more than one product that sticks to each other, because it creates more value.

“I'm almost delivering it in a nice little bow for them to say, you put these two things together, and maybe a security product as well, and you can go position this for customer, for a value-added service.”

Taylor added that this new feature coincides with the launch of Azul’s managed services this year.

Australian opportunity

Azul works with several partners in Australia including NTT, DXC, Dynacom, Data#3, and NCS Australia.

There are two major issues affecting Aussie partners in the Java space, licensing and modernisation.

According to Taylor, these partners are already doing a significant number of Java migrations and Azul has been able to come in and give them licensing value.

“We can speed up the way you view those Java applications and give you other value added capability,” he said.

“The opportunity in Australia market is predominantly the same as everywhere else in the world, which is Java licensing as it relates to Oracle and now with IBM and Red Hat.”

Australian partners are looking to Azul for that modernisation piece, Taylor explained.

“How can I help them modernise their Java applications? And that isn't refactoring, it's not rebuilding applications. It's just re-hosting. It's like taking a legacy application moving in the cloud and making it run faster.

“We can do that very well and very quickly, both as ourselves and with our technical alliance partners like Moderne and Chainguard.”