Azul has announced the appointment of Kenny Johnston as chief product officer. 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.
Kenny Johnston appointed Chief Product Officer at Azul.
Previously CPTO at Luciq, an agentic AI observability platform.
Senior Director of Product Management at GitLab for CI/CD and observability products.
At Rackspace, tripled annual revenue for Private Cloud and earned HPE Partner of the Year.
Will lead product strategy across Azul Prime, Core, Intelligence Cloud, and Payara products.
Azul powers 37% of the Fortune 100 and top 10 financial trading companies.
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. His mandate is to advance the roadmap around the demands AI is placing on every enterprise Java estate: cost, performance, security, modernization, and productivity. Azul's product roadmap focuses on alleviating the pressures AI places on enterprise Java: absorbing AI workload demand and optimizing cloud cost, narrowing the AI-era security and patch-velocity gap, enabling AI-driven modernization, and giving AI-modernized workloads the scalability, security, and automation they need.
"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."
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.
