Today’s architectures are increasingly complex, with a mix of static and dynamic platforms and applications running in multiple environments. All of these applications carry different requirements, dependencies, compute and storage needs, and more.

As demands increase for IT businesses and CIOs to reduce Operating Expenditures (OPEX), while adding better value and new services, IT leaders must consider and prioritize what they need now, and what they may need in the future.

Java Enterprise Performance Pack (Java EPP) is a solution that bridges the gap outlined above, allowing organizations to continue executing on customer innovation while delivering performance, meeting cost expectations, and allowing the development team to improve features while focus remains on the central application architecture.

Enterprise Challenges

Enterprise organizations and IT face increasingly difficult business directives to deliver more innovation and business value with less budget, fewer resources, and ensure it happens faster than before. Enterprise software systems are not easy to maintain, and while all organizations aim for amazing customer experiences and services while reducing OPEX, overhead, and time to market, collectively reaching all goals is very difficult. 

Today’s successul technology and IT leaders and professionals are pulled in multiple directions, never having enough time for everything, and often wearing several hats, from Architect to IT manager, developer to administrator, and more, in order to make their enterprise and business-critical systems work.

This is often the reason IT organizations do not update their applications and services, yet the business may heavily rely upon these systems to deliver value to internal business teams, and external customers and partners. However, operational and performance updates are required to keep these critical applications running, competitive, and interoperable with new services.

 

Case Study: Oracle Fusion Applications

The Oracle Fusion Application team needed to improve their offerings while maintaining the speed of innovation, while only working with existing financial and engineering resources. Moreover, due to a number of external dependencies and legacy code, maintaining compatibility with application data and other services was critical to success.

The Fusion’s team services a massive customer base, from small to medium size enterprises to major F100 companies, and these customers have diverse and complex needs. Fusion applications see dozens of feature updates each quarter, and support over 14,000 customers across healthcare, gaming, industrial manufacturing, finance, and telecommunications.

To meet critical customer needs, Fusion had to find a solution to meet specific demands of performance, memory improvements, cost savings, and more, without an entire codebase re-write or application re-factor, while at the same time keeping the applications coupled with the proper data in the cloud.

Additional IT challenges like compliance, version management, and security baselines are already complex; and to offer a range of options (on-premise vs cloud) while improving performance seemed too challenging to tackle with OPEX at it’s limit and resources already bound to other priorities.

The Solution: Java EPP

Java EPP benefits from innovation introduced between JDK 8 and JDK 17, including performance and memory improvements The Fusion team quickly realized that EPP could meet their needs and requirements: simple procedures, no impacts on compatibility, and an increase in memory and CPU savings.

“The Enterprise Performance Pack is a drop-in replacement that brings Java 17 performance to Java 8 workloads, while reducing memory utilization and helping enterprise IT organizations save OPEX in multiple areas, including CPUs.”

  • Donald Smith, Vice President, Product Management, Java Platform Group

Using Java EPP, Oracle Fusion was able to keep the design patterns and code it had created previously, and realize significant gains in performance both in compute and memory usage. Fusion customers with external dependencies are unaffected but benefit from faster response times in the hosted applications and more cost effective application optimization on specific hardware. Most importantly, Fusion ws able to deliver the same security, scalability, and reliability Oracle customers expect.

Moreover, the Fusion team experienced improvements in application response times by almost 40% and saw CPU utilization decrease by 25%, with memory utilization improving by over 20%. Performance Enhancements of Java EPP include tests showing ~40% better workload (application) performance, a reduction in memory footprint requirements, and pause times for garbage collection were reduced by up to 99%*.

“We did the Java EPP rollout gradually, and had no issues. Over the period of the last year, we have monitored the performance, and the testing was validated – memory and processor gains have checked out and have been stable.”

– Rahul Sarin @ Oracle

In Conclusion

Efficiency and price-performance have always been important, but with the addition of new technologies and processes such as AI, new application lifecycle tools, application containerization, ephemeral environments, and an everchanging business and technology landscape, it’s never been more important to protect your investments, harden your IT application environment, and look to save OPEX for your core business and customer needs.

If your organization is looking to modernize legacy applications, Java EPP offers easy implementation, strong application performance improvements, and a reduction in OPEX and resources, leaving more time for IT leaders to focus on new requirements and their business bottom line.

 

* In internal testing, performance benefits varied across type of customer, workloads, and outside dependencies, with consistency in lower memory usage, significantly less time doing garbage collection, and CPU and response times improved across most customer usage patterns.