Faced with an employee-metric renewal quote of $2.1M a year, a retail bank migrated its entire Java estate to OpenJDK — removing the Oracle Java SE Subscription cost altogether.
The bank ran Oracle Java across core banking interfaces, internal applications, batch processing, and developer workstations. Historically this had cost relatively little.
When Oracle moved Java SE to the company-wide employee metric, the renewal quote jumped to roughly $2.1M a year — priced on total headcount rather than on actual Java use. For a cost that delivered no new capability, that number was impossible to defend to the board.
The bank wanted to know whether it could leave Oracle Java entirely, what that would take, and how to do it without putting regulated systems at risk.
We mapped each Oracle JDK and Java SE deployment, its version, and the application depending on it — production, test, and developer environments alike.
For each workload we verified that a supported OpenJDK build was a functional, drop-in replacement, flagging the small number that needed attention.
We helped the bank choose well-supported OpenJDK distributions with security updates appropriate for a regulated environment — at no Oracle licence cost.
Non-production first, then low-risk production, then core systems — each phase tested and signed off before the next began.
Once every workload was running on OpenJDK, Oracle Java was removed and the subscription was allowed to lapse, with evidence retained.
Nine months after starting, the bank ran no Oracle Java at all. The $2.1M annual subscription was removed from the run-rate in full, replaced by the modest internal cost of supported OpenJDK builds.
Because the migration was phased and tested, no regulated system experienced disruption. The bank also closed the door on the employee metric entirely — future Oracle Java price rises simply no longer apply to it.
The Oracle Java SE Subscription cost was eliminated, every year, going forward.
A phased, tested rollout meant no downtime on regulated banking systems.
With no Oracle Java in the estate, future employee-metric price rises do not apply.
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