‘Our goal is to help organisations overcome the challenges to cloud adoption, so they don’t need to reverse their strategies’
Cloud technology empowers organisations to adapt swiftly to changing markets, experiment boldly with new ideas, and build efficient infrastructure that drives innovation.
Computing’s Cloud Excellence Awards recognise the very best of the UK’s cloud industry, from the most innovative and compelling products and vendors to the top use cases from end-user firms.
This year’s winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Thursday 18th September in London.
Payara Services, this year, is a finalist in three categories: Best Cloud Support Provider, Cloud Management Solution of the Year, and Multi/Hybrid Cloud Product of the Year.
We caught up with Steve Millidge, CEO and Founder of Payara Services, to know how do they plan to capitalise of main opportunities for the industry in the coming year.
Steve is the founder and CEO of Payara Services. He is an experienced technology founder, growing and building a bootstrapped open-source software company from scratch to $7M+ annual recurring revenue and 100+ customers. Steve is an expert in Java, as he has been working with the technology since pre-1.0 and has worked on large-scale distributed applications and application servers since the 1990s. Before founding Payara Services, Steve ran a consultancy company providing advice and guidance on architecting, building and running at scale large web applications on Java technologies.
Why do you think awards like the Cloud Excellence Awards matter? What would winning this award mean to your company?
Payara Services believes in the value of renowned prizes, such as the Cloud Excellence Awards, as they are well established accolades that acknowledge and celebrate innovation, reliability and leadership in the sector. As a company providing cloud-native solutions, winning a Cloud Excellence Award would be a major milestone for Payara Services. It would underscore our position as a trusted partner for cloud adoption and cloud-native deployments while attesting to the value that our technologies bring. We see the cloud as an enabler of freedom and flexibility, but also as a place where complexity can limit innovation.
An award like this would therefore highlight more than our technology. It would emphasise the importance of giving enterprises enabling solutions and options through software that integrates seamlessly into different environments, frameworks and technologies. Ultimately, it would affirm that success in the cloud is not just about scalability and speed, but about creating sustainable, collaborative foundations.
What would you say is your company’s proudest achievement over the past year?
Over the past year, Payara Services has managed to achieve significant milestones, from considerably growing our workforce to expanding our Payara Platform product portfolio. In particular, our proudest achievement has certainly been the launch of Payara Qube and its recognition as Cloud Excellence Awards finalist. The platform offers a unified, fully-automated, zero-maintenance and fully supported runtime for one-click deployments of enterprise Java applications based on Jakarta EE, Spring and Quarkus frameworks.
Payara Qube was developed to simplify cloud deployment by abstracting infrastructure and Kubernetes complexity while supporting the variety of frameworks and environments that software specialists typically need to handle. It also provides integrated observability and fine-grained security for robustness. It has been incredibly rewarding to see that, immediately after the launch, existing customers and other global organisations were keen to engage with us. They are excited to trial and leverage Payara Qube in order to drive cloud adoption, drive efficiencies and support their developers in DevOps-related activities.
What have been the biggest challenges of 2025 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?
2025 is being a particular year, characterised by growing interest in cloud adoption and the simultaneous retreat from public clouds to on-premises, mostly due to cost, data sovereignty and security concerns.
Our “Payarans” have been central to overcoming these challenges and support our customers. They have been collaborating across departments, innovated rapidly and advised customers directly to simplify the move to the cloud, ensure smooth transitions and deployments, e.g. through opinionated setups and create better suited cloud deployments, as well as by offering multi and hybrid, private and public cloud environments. In addition, we launched and regularly expand AI-oriented and integrated technologies that improve productivity and application capabilities, such as Payara Starter.
How do you think the industry has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?
The industry has seen growing interest in cloud-native technologies, containerisation and AI integration. However, their adoption to support enterprise application remains challenging, with complex and lengthy setup, deployment as well as management. In addition, there are still gaps in unification and adherence to shared best practices across diverse frameworks, platforms and environments.
Enterprises need comprehensive solutions designed around Platform Engineering principles to address these issues by reducing operational overheads, improving developer productivity and consistency while supporting rapid innovation. Technologies like Payara Qube that combine opinionated configurations, automation as well as observability tools that are both intuitive and comprehensive are the future. These will be key to making application development, deployment and management simplified, more accessible and less fragmented.
What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?
The coming year presents opportunities in multi-/hybrid-cloud optimisation, AI integration and modernisation of legacy enterprise applications. At Payara Services, we plan to capitalise on these opportunities by continuing to evolve the Payara Platform, enhancing cloud-enabling technologies, automation, observability, and AI-assisted development tools. Our goal is to help organisations overcome the challenges to cloud adoption, so they don’t need to reverse their strategies and can successfully innovate faster while keeping all their applications secure, compliant and performant.
Cloud Excellence Awards will take place on 18th September in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.