We have observed a positive return on investment as our services have improved, resulting in increased customer acquisition, a rise in the number of new accounts being opened daily, and prompt response times due to the absence of any downtime. I give the ROI a nine out of ten.

I usually work as support and implementation personal, ROI usually calculated by customers internally.

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

We have witnessed an ROI of 130%.

In terms of the upgrades, moving from previous versions to POWER8, I absolutely see a return on investment. We're virtualizing it, and being able to share across the multiple organizations that we support, we're able to push the utilization upwards of 70%. 

Previously we would create physical LPARs and there would be one or two LPARs and we'd only be utilizing 10% of a 770, or the 570s, or 670s. So it was a got a million dollar system, and we were using 10%. That's $100,000 worth of use, $900,000 is not being used. 

Now we're pushing that utilization to where we have a lot more virtual LPARs and we're actually using that full system instead of having ten million-dollar systems. We have one million-dollar system and we're using ten virtuals on it.

In terms of a move from version to version, and the return on investment from a move from POWER7 to 8, or from 5 to 6, I would say the software has gotten friendlier, more robust, easier to use, easier to upgrade. I think the advantages you get from going to POWER6, POWER7, POWER8 are a bigger thing than going from AIX 6 to 7.

On the hardware side the upgrades are great. With POWER8 we picked up SMT8, and that made a big improvement. If you have applications that can take advantage of it - we run mostly IBM software - so of course the software is enabled.

In terms of the upgrade from version to version, we see a return on investment, absolutely. There are always features, improvement, SQL and Java; on the hardware, on Power. 

With the technology, when I went from POWER5 to POWER6, I got a something like a 71% increase in horsepower. When I went from POWER6 to 7 I think it was a 20% improvement in CPW. And I believe from POWER7 to 8, I've been told it's either 75% or double.

So every time IBM comes out with a newer chip, great improvements.

Mainly performance and flexibility is getting better and better. So I would say yes, slowly but steadily, we are seeing a return on investment of the expense in upgrading from the previous versions to the version we're using now.

I believe that the Power platform has a very high return on the initial investment because of the kind of scalability and the reliability that the system has. It also provides the ability to meet multiple workloads - with such high reliability - because of the PowerHA platform. 

The powerHA product that we are building on it is really making the product very reliable and very cost effective for the customer. So the the TCO, total cost of ownership, is really low when you compare it with x86 platform or any other platform.

The initial investment may be high, but at the end of the day you have to look at it from a three-year or five-year point of view. And that's where Power really scales way above any other computing platform.

In terms of the upgrades from previous versions, we definitely see a return on investment. We get more processor, more CPW, and it's basically the same price.

We don't really measure because we lease the system, so we have a natural opportunity. I would expect that if we went back and we tracked the performance per dollar spent, we would see a return on investment improvement.

This doesn't really apply to me, but I certainly think the customers are seeing ROI in their move from seven to eight. I don't know anybody who moved to eight and said, "Darn, I wish I had stuck with seven." They seem to be pretty happy and that's usually the best measure, right?

We have been seeing a return on investment in the moves from version to version due to better performance and they cut the licensing costs down. 

In terms of the upgrades of AIX and the Power from the 7 to the 8, I did see a return of the investment because we have a small Oracle data base running on some of our apps. To be able to take it from the POWER7 where you're using .1 CPU - this is just in development - that you could take it down to .05 CPU and double the number of LPARs that you have, that is a very good feature.

We do see ROI from the move from POWER7 to POWER8. We do capacity management and we are able to move quite a lot of workload.

In terms of a return on investment from upgrading from a previous version of AIX to the current version, from a financial standpoint I don't really see a difference.

But for performance, it's not so much just the performance, it's the new features that come in the code that makes it appealing to me.

POWER8 definitely handles the workload better than POWER7 did, as far as the threading between having a lot of partitions running in a system. There is less impact when the system doesn't bog down, when a lot of applications are running.

We were able to reduce to a single frame.

There are a lot of day-to-day administrative tasks. Problems that you face in a typical environment, you will not face on Power Systems. If you secure your environment, you can better focus on other productive tasks for your organization, other than spending time logging into your VMs and making changes after every little while and things like that. Your technical teams can offload a lot of the daily routine tasks.

We do see a return on that investment, especially on the software licensing, when we are licensing DB2 or we are licensing WebSphere. We have seen that we have had to license fewer cores on the POWER8 than we had on the POWER7.

When upgrading from previous versions, in terms of ROI, maybe now there's a little bit, but at least that way it's always backwards compatible, so we don't really have any upgrade issues. I guess the payment back would be the low likelihood of failure or failed upgrades.

We just moved to POWER8 this year, and we saw a big improvement from POWER7.

We see a return on investment from the move to POWER8.

I am unsure if the clients have seen a return on investment.

We do see return on investment by upgrading from version to version.

I don't think that it's so much power, speed; it's the feature functionality. Some of the newer things that you are able to do with the newer versions, more so than the old days, when it was, "We get X amount of speed." That doesn't happen as much as the new features that are available.

For example, some of the Java things they're doing. Some of the things security-wise, there are a lot of great enhancements.

When it comes to upgrading from POWER7 to 8, or other upgrades, there can be a return on investment because you can use some parts of a POWER7 machine and build them in to a new POWER8 and I think it's a cost savings for our customers.

I don't know too much about licensing or prices or the like, even though I get involved in the configuration, presales and that kind of thing. I am just hoping to see what is coming with POWER9.

I don't get to look at most of that. It's kind of above my pay scale, but from my understanding, from what I've heard through the grapevine, ROI is there.

We had maxed out our earlier versions, and when we moved to a POWER7 we saw a definite performance increase. It was able to take care of some of the bottlenecks that we were experiencing. In terms of power usage and space it's been great as well.

In terms of the AIX, we are  definitely seeing a return on investment from moving from original versions of Power to POWER8, in performance. And we're definitely getting a per-core gain by moving to POWER8. In addition, the whole I/O speeds in general are improving.

Going from POWER7 to POWER8, the big thing to me is it's not even necessarily the performance, it's the capability of virtualizing, more easily done through some of the different technologies that we have so it can spin up new environments more easily.

When moving from previous versions to POWER8, or in general when upgrading, you see a return on investment. You get an improvement in technology and that means customers trust in the platform, that they are going to invest money and they're going to get that money back. Not just in terms of upgrading the versions because they're performing badly, but in reliability for the customers because of the service they are providing.

Compared to what we've dealt with, with Sun Solaris/Oracle and Compaq, the cost model is great.

In terms of the upgrade from previous systems to POWER8, we've seen a return on investment. We're able to do more with less. We're actually using fewer engineers to do it. I'm kind of skeptical that we could do even more with even fewer engineers, but yes, it can always be improved.