Azul, the trusted leader in enterprise Java for today’s AI -first world, today announced the appointment of Kenny Johnston as chief product officer (CPO). Johnston brings deep experience building agentic, AI-powered enterprise DevOps and observability tools and platforms and will lead product strategy for Azul’s AI-first Java platform — engineered to meet the performance, security and cost demands of running enterprise AI workloads at scale.

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Kenny Johnston, Chief Product Officer at Azul

Kenny Johnston, Chief Product Officer at Azul

Most recently, Johnston served as chief product and technology officer at Luciq, an agentic AI observability platform built for enterprise mobile app teams, where he led global product, design, customer success and engineering functions delivering agentic capabilities such as SmartResolve and Agentic Mode. Earlier in his career, Johnston was senior director of product management at GitLab, where he led product management for all operations and infrastructure products including GitLab CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Package & Release Management as well as Observability and Incident Response. At Rackspace, he served as director of product management for Rackspace Private Cloud, more than tripling annual revenue and earning recognition as HPE’s Global Service Provider Partner of the Year.

As CPO at Azul, Johnston will lead product strategy and execution across Azul’s AI-first Java platform — Azul Prime, Azul Core, Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul Payara Micro and Azul Payara Server, the latter two added to the Azul platform through Azul’s December 2025 acquisition of Payara. His mandate is to advance the roadmap around the demands AI is placing on every enterprise Java estate: cost, performance, security, modernization and productivity.

“Java is the backbone of the world’s most critical enterprise systems, and AI is amplifying the pressure on all of it,” said Johnston. “The opportunity is to bring an AI-first, DevOps-centric vision to how Java is developed, deployed, secured and monitored in the enterprise. I’ve spent my career helping world-class teams accelerate through transformative moments like this, and I’m excited to build on the strong foundation Azul has already established.”

“Kenny’s track record of scaling enterprise product organizations to build products that address business-critical use cases makes him exactly the right product leader as AI reshapes the performance, security and cost demands of every enterprise Java estate,” said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO. “Under his leadership, we’re focused on continuing to build out our AI-first Java platform and helping drive Azul into its next phase of growth.”

To learn more about Azul’s AI-first Java platform, visit azul.com.

FAQs

What is an AI-first Java platform?

An AI-first Java platform is a Java runtime and application platform built and optimized to support AI-driven, agentic software development, with the performance, observability and security enterprises need to run AI-driven workloads at scale. Azul’s AI-first Java platform spans Azul Prime, Azul Core, Intelligence Cloud, Payara Micro and Payara Server, added through its December 2025 acquisition of Payara.

Why do enterprises use Java for AI applications?

Java’s maturity, portability and performance make it a common foundation for the enterprise systems that AI capabilities access and integrate with, and modern JVMs can be tuned to meet the low-latency, high-throughput demands of AI workloads. Azul’s AI-first Java platform is designed to deliver that performance, strengthen security and help reduce the cloud costs AI workloads add, giving enterprises a meaningful advantage as they bring agentic AI into mission-critical Java environments.

Why does Java performance matter for AI applications?

The enterprise systems AI depends on are mostly written in Java, and AI is putting new pressure on them. Agentic workflows call Java services at far higher volume, and those services increasingly sit in the critical path of AI interactions. Throughput, garbage collection pauses, warm-up and memory overhead in the JVM turn into slow or inconsistent performance and response times, and the usual fix is to add capacity. Azul Prime is built to attack these bottlenecks in the runtime instead, giving enterprises a faster, more predictable Java runtime for AI-driven workloads.

What will Azul’s product roadmap focus on?

Azul’s product roadmap focuses on alleviating the pressures AI places on enterprise Java: absorbing AI workload demand and optimizing cloud cost (Azul Prime), narrowing the AI-era security and patch-velocity gap (Azul Core), enabling AI-driven modernization (Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul Payara), and giving AI-modernized workloads the scalability, security and automation they need (all Azul products).

About Azul

Azul is the trusted leader in enterprise Java for today’s AI-first world. Its open source-based Java platform empowers organizations to optimize the entire Java lifecycle to accelerate performance, strengthen security, reduce licensing and cloud costs, and boost developer productivity. Azul powers mission-critical systems for 37% of the Fortune 100, 50% of the Forbes Top 10 World’s Most Valuable Brands, and the world’s top 10 financial trading companies. Learn more at azul.com and follow @azulsystems.

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