Definitely a niche, but one I'm glad someone is filling
For midrange workloads like Oracle DBs, HANA, etc , we take advantage of that 2.5x performance of similarly kitted x86 servers in a different way. That means we can do with 8-10 cores, what it would take Intel kit 20-24 cores to do. When you're paying hundreds of thousands per core for licensing, that makes up the difference quite quickly.
Add to that, the call-in and in-person support for Power is loads better than anyone's x86 support that I've used.
Yes, you pay for it, but if you need it, it can't be beaten, and if you're making up the extra cost of hardware and support in savings on software licensing and support, it makes all the sense in the world.
We're looking at upgrading current Power 7 based servers to Power 9 sooner than later.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
