Azul, the trusted leader in enterprise Java for AI -first world, 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.

“Kenny’s track record of scaling enterprise 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.”

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.”