IBM’s Transactional Business And Pipeline

I can’t speak to the yield. I can speak to the yield about 10 weeks from now. The yield will come in over the next 10 weeks as opposed to right now.

If I look at our pipeline, pipeline indicates the strength that we are seeing. That is what gave us confidence to say that we see revenue coming in above our mid-single-digit growth model.

We see the pipelines are strong across software and hardware. So the very strong hardware growth in the third quarter, that is captured in the infrastructure business. I think that all reflects the demand that is there and across geographies—so not any particular, single market being strong.

If I look at software, I expect that the overall growth will remain strong. There’ll be some puts and takes in a couple of small countries. It’s possible. But that is the advantage of having a business that goes across 170 countries where that tends to get absorbed into the overall.

Right now, I’ll tell you, good pipelines based on the first nine months of the year. We expect yields to remain good or even better than before. … There is an impact on FX [foreign exchange rates]. That is probably the biggest impact to what we’re seeing right now.

I certainly, I’ll say, hope that we are seeing the end of the dollar strengthening as opposed to another significant change.