“While, as always, we are reliant on a seasonally strong fourth quarter, we're on track to achieve about $10.5 billion for the year.”

In context

“d of IBM's 3% to 5% range. We are making great progress in our productivity initiatives. The work we are doing to digitally transform our business not only makes us more nimble by simplifying and streamlining our processes and operations, but it also frees up spend for reinvestment, provides financial flexibility and delivers operating leverage. This contributes to solid margin and free cash flow performance. We continue to expect about a 0.5 point of operating pre-tax margin improvement, and we see a mid-teens tax rate for the year. Our free cash flow performance has been driven primarily from our profit performance. Through the first three quarters, we're up $1 billion year-to-year, and we've delivered nearly 50% of our full year expectation, which is ahead of our historical attainment. While, as always, we are reliant on a seasonally strong fourth quarter, we're on track to achieve about $10.5 billion for the year. As I look specifically at the fourth quarter, with the recent currency movements, we now see currency to be neutral to a 1-point headwind to revenue growth. That's nearly $600 million worse than 90 days ago. I'd expect constant currency revenue growth in the fourth quarter to be similar to the third. That's despite a tough compare from last year's strong ELA contribution in Software and the large z16 transactional performance in Infrastructure. This demonstrates continued momentum in our underlying business. Bring it all together, we've clearly got a higher-growth, higher-value business with strong cash generation, a business well-positioned for the future. Arvind and I are now happy to take your questions. Patricia, let's get started. Patricia Murphy: Thank you, Jim. Before we begin the”