I am speaking on “Selling ColdFusion to Clients” at CFUNITED-07. I think ColdFusion compares well techically to Java, .Net and PHP. It is often much faster to develop in CF than other web languages – partly due to it being tag based, due to the large amount of build in functionality that has an easy to use interface (eg CFMAIL) and of course the very active ColdFusion community.
I read an interesting article on ColdFusion from a Java programmer's point of view at Clark's blog. You can consider CF to be a super Java tag library with a lot of cool features added in such as the CF admin, caching and just in time compilation. Interesting…
Also the answer depends if I am selling to a CIO, a programmer or an end user. It often seems that there is a political angle: “We are a Microsoft shop” or “We have standardized on BEA”.
So what strategies do you use for selling the ColdFusion platform to clients?