“If I look at the underlying macros, all the parts we talked about Red Hat, I see them maintaining themselves into 2026. This is not unique to this quarter or a month. And so I would expect to see that same growth carry on there.”

In context

“overall software growth heading into 2026 from the current 10% levels this year? I mean I wonder if you think that's possible. And then maybe secondarily, if you could just address the consulting business and what you're seeing right now in terms of the duration of the bookings you're seeing and whether there's any kind of change in the time to commencement of some of the consulting contracts you're signing. Arvind Krishna: Jim, thanks for the question, though I did, I think, count 3 parts in there. Let me address the first part on the software macro going into '26, and then I'll give it over to our Jim, Jim Kavanaugh, for some of the details there and on Consulting. Look, I think the question you're asking is one that we spend a lot of time on and one that I'm incredibly confident about. If I look at the underlying macros, all the parts we talked about Red Hat, I see them maintaining themselves into 2026. This is not unique to this quarter or a month. And so I would expect to see that same growth carry on there. If I look at Automation, that is really driven by the complexity of our clients' technology environments and then them wanting to run them at extremely high resilience. They want to run them at much lower labor cost expense, and the amount of compute to their environments is increasing, so they need technology. We label that Automation to go run all that. We can see that the desire to unlock value from all of the data, to unlock data for AI as well as to deploy AI inside the enterprise, which is where we are focused, is going to only accelerate, not decrease. So all those 3 parts of the portfolio, I would give you equal or higher growth rates going into 2026. Now you come to TP and Jim addressed that. TP tends to be slightly lagging with the capacity that is being deployed on mainframes.”