IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna called his company’s partner ecosystem a “crucial element” of the tech giant’s go-to-market while highlighting strong returns from IBM’s Red Hat business, consulting segment and offerings around hybrid cloud, automation and mainframes.

These are some of the highlights of Krishna’s remarks to investors Wednesday during the company’s earnings call for the third quarter of IBM’s fiscal year, a quarter that ended Sept. 30.

“Our partner ecosystem is a crucial element of our strategy,” Krishna said. “Each quarter, we continue to expand the work we do with partners to serve our joint clients.”

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Here’s more of what Krishna had to say about IBM’s performance and the road ahead.

IBM Raised Revenue Guidance

Technology remains a fundamental source of competitive advantage. And we continue to see solid demand for our hybrid cloud and AI solutions.

Continued double-digit revenue growth in IBM Consulting captured client demand for digital transformation. Software revenue performance was also strong, with growth across all categories. And our infrastructure business had another high-growth quarter in both Z systems and distributed infrastructure. Our revenue strength was broad-based geographically as well.

When I talk with clients, it’s clear there’s a real opportunity to help businesses leverage technology in today‘s environment. Clients are dealing with everything from inflation to demographic shifts, from supply chain bottlenecks to sustainability efforts.

By deploying powerful hybrid cloud and AI technologies, IBM is helping businesses seize new opportunities, overcome today’s challenges and emerge stronger. We, too, are building a stronger company that is closely aligned to the needs of our clients.

In line with our hybrid cloud and AI strategy, we have continued to focus our portfolio; invest in our offerings, technical talent and ecosystem; and streamline our go-to-market model with strong performance through the first three quarters.

We are taking up our revenue expectations for the year and now expect 2022 revenue above our mid-single-digit model.