* Spot-on diagnosis resulting in very specific and targeting changes. There should be no question about how we arrived at our recommendations.

* Each recommendation was accompanied with an anticipatory impact shown both graphically and numerically. Even without doing any predictive mathematics, the anticipated performance situation change was clearly evident when presenting the response-time curves, further building consensus around the recommendations.

* The systematic analysis naturally created an easy-to-follow and convincing story containing plenty of abstraction for the nontechnical folks, as well as specific Oracle internals and even some mathematics to satisfy the more technically astute.