Azul has appointed Kenny Johnston as chief product officer, tasking him with leading product strategy for what the company describes as its “AI-first Java platform”.
In the role, Johnston will oversee product strategy and execution across Azul Prime, Azul Core, Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul Payara Micro and Azul Payara Server. Azul said Payara Micro and Payara Server were added through its acquisition of Payara in December 2025.
Azul said Johnston’s mandate includes advancing the roadmap to address pressures it says AI is placing on enterprise Java environments, including cost, performance, security, modernisation and productivity.
Johnston most recently served as chief product and technology officer at Luciq, an agentic AI observability platform for enterprise mobile app teams, where he led product, design, customer success and engineering. Earlier, he was senior director of product management at GitLab, leading product management for operations and infrastructure products including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, package and release management, as well as observability and incident response.
He previously worked at Rackspace as director of product management for Rackspace Private Cloud.
“Java is the backbone of the world’s most critical enterprise systems, and AI is amplifying the pressure on all of it,” Johnston said. “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.”
Azul co-founder and CEO Scott Sellers said Johnston’s background in scaling enterprise product organisations aligned with shifting demands on Java environments. “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,” Sellers said.
