Hardware cheaper than C++ programmers

I had an interesting discussion with a potential client yesterday. Many financial companies program their analytics libraries in C++, either for legacy reasons or because you can do some interesting optimizations using pointers and other C/C++ constructs. This client's infrastructure was written entirely in Java and deployed on a grid. He told me that the JVM hotspot optimizations were pretty good and that simply adding another blade to the grid was cheaper than hiring a C++ programmer to squeeze out that extra bit of performance.