Explaining XTP to the business consumer

How do you make the case for something that is so highly technical as extreme transaction processing, when you are conversing with a mostly non-technical crowd? I've puzzled about this for a while now. I think the only way to do this effectively is to talk about the approach in an abstract sense and relate the return to something tangible to the particular crowd. For the business, it comes down to dollars and competitive differentiation. They neither care nor can conceive of the design differences between 500 tps and 50,000 tps request processing.

I wrote a fine 100+ page document for a customer outlining their 5 year IT strategy plan, which is largely centered on XTP and a couple of other things. Sure, extreme transaction processing is typically the domain of "extreme" volume. But, invert the design plan, and you get efficient transaction processing - the most bang for the least bucks. We're talking about taking monkey work out of the extraordinarily expensive data tier and letting the much less expensive app tier keep a copy of the data it most frequently needs. Think "scale-down computing". Take one machine, make it do as much as it possibly can, and continue deploying until you meet your SLAs. In so doing, we avoid the need to make bigger the really expensive parts of our environment (mainframes, RDBMS, SAN, etc) until there is absolutely no other course of action.

A ha. Now we're getting somewhere.

In the unlikely event that someone is actually reading this, does that make sense to you?