Welcome back to Evercore ISI's Eighth Annual Payments and FinTech Innovators Forum. I'm David Togut. I lead the Payments, Processors, and IT Services Research Team here at Evercore ISI. Really delighted to kick off our fireside chat with the management of Kyndryl. Joining us from Kyndryl are Chairman and CEO Martin Schroeter. We also have the IR team here with us, Vice President of Investor Relations Lori Chaitman, and her colleague Bobby Grau. Thank you all for joining us here today. We greatly appreciate it.
Thank you, David. Nice to be here.
Let's start with the three A's. Alliances, Accounts, and Advanced Delivery, which represent the core of Kyndryl's strategy. Where are you most confident of your progress, and where do you see the most room for improvement?
Yeah, look, it does sit at the heart of what we're getting done in order to get this business back to a growth trajectory and obviously at the level of profitability that we are confident we can generate. Each of them plays a little bit of a different role in that. If I just sort of tick through the three A's in our alliances activity, we were late to the game working with the other hyperscalers because we were owned by a company that had its own cloud. But once we became independent, within a week we signed a really important and meaningful relationship with Microsoft, a month later Google, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We said at the time already, because of the role we play in our customers' environments, that we think we can sign $1 billion just with those three hyperscalers in the first year. We wound up, as you know, we delivered about $1.2 billion of signings. Then this year, as we moved into the second year, we said, look, we'll now focus on converting that into revenue. We started by saying we'll get at least $300 million this year from that. We actually got that done in nine months. Now we said we'd get at least $400 million out of that. But that represents a big part of the growth. While I don't think I'm unique in the role I have and being impatient, I think it's going really, really well.
So that's a business that, as we look at the medium-term, should be a $1 billion-plus business fairly quickly. Secondly, on Advanced Delivery, another A, look, we've made very good progress. We've always viewed the Advanced Delivery opportunity as at the shorter end of the medium-term time frame. If you think three-to-five years as medium-term, we always felt that we could make progress in Advanced Delivery the fastest. Not that it's entirely in our control, but it is more in our control. And obviously, again, we've made a ton of progress, and that's showing up in the P&L. There's still more to do. And Advanced Delivery for us is really focused on better service levels, better responsive infrastructure for our customers. And it allows us to do it more efficiently as well.
So that's going, I think, very, very well also and consistent sort of with how we've thought about it. Then finally, the third A of Focus Accounts, it's the least in our control because you have to work with your customers. Let's remember that we're not really exiting any of these relationships. We are recasting and reimagining these relationships with our customers. That involves bringing new capabilities. It involves sometimes taking certain content out. But at the end of the day, because our customers really like what we do, and they like our delivery, and they like our quality, and they like the innovation we're bringing, this is really about working with our customers on reimagining what those relationships can look like. So in that, again, that medium-term time frame, that's always been sort of later, I think, in terms of realizing the full benefit.
But each of them, each of the A's, is moving at a suitable pace for us to achieve what we set out to achieve in the medium term. So look, I think the teams have done a phenomenal job of executing. I think they were very fast out the gate on the Alliances activity, and that's gone well. They're very fast out of the gate on improving quality even further with our Advanced Delivery initiatives. And that's showing up in the Focus Accounts. Again, going well. It just takes time. We've got to work with our customers who, again, they like what we're doing. They want to figure this out with us.
Just as a follow-up, you noted that you have a $1 billion medium-term revenue target for the alliances. What's the next step in the development of your relationships with the hyperscalers? What's going to drive the next big amount of revenue growth?
Yeah, it's a great question. So look, the initial partnership agreements were built around kind of three things. One was a joint go-to-market. So we show up with our partners in our customers' sites to help move workloads, to help run workloads across these hyperscalers. And that's been really powerful. So joint go-to-market, joint investment, if you will. They've invested heavily in our skill base. We now, basically from a standing start when we were spun, when you could count the number of hyperscaler certifications and credentials that we had across all of Kyndryl, in the hundreds if you were lucky, we're north of 35,000 now. And that's been not only our investment, but our partners' investment in our skills and in our education. So joint go-to-market, joint skills investments. And the third part has always been about co-innovation.
And I finished that one third because that is what we're already seeing now is going to be the next step of growth. So it's not just about managing this disparate infrastructure and complex infrastructure. It's also now about, for instance, you would have seen that we announced another deeper partnership with Microsoft and Google and AWS on Gen AI and how we get our customers, our joint customers, ready for that. And it's the nature of that co-innovation that I think is going to drive the next level of growth. So again, we've got a lot more to do just on the basics of managing the infrastructure. But then on top of that, we're getting into now in the co-innovation space where helping customers do sort of the what's next, next.
And that's what's next today for many customers is AI and Gen AI and getting their data ready across these hyperscalers.
You highlighted the accounts initiative earlier. If you could double-click on the accounts initiative in terms of how far along you are in moving from kind of Focus Accounts at lower margin to the Blueprint Accounts, and what's the timeline to hit the target to get most of these into the Blueprint margin category?
Yeah, sure. So by the time we get to the end of this fiscal year, we've got a month and a day. It's a leap year, I was reminded yesterday. So we've got a month and a day left in this fiscal year. We'll have about half of the accounts, I'd say, through that process. But as you know, the way that shows up in the P&L takes time because we reimagine a relationship. And then it goes into the backlog, and then it'll come out of the backlog over time. So we'll see the benefit play out over the time frames we talked about over the three to 5-year period. We're already seeing some of it now. We'll see more again next year and more the year after that, et cetera. So the benefits will keep going for a while.
And look, quite frankly, when we set the $800, in order to achieve the $800 million that we put on the table two years ago, that was only a piece of what we see in total. So there is more still beyond that as well. So I think we're in great shape to realize the benefits with more to do. We've already sort of solved, if you will, by the end of the fiscal year, we'll have solved half. But that represents more than already half the opportunity we identified. So there's still additional upside forthcoming.
Are there any themes in terms of where geographically the remaining Focus Accounts are located or by industry? I mean, how should we think about kind of the other half of that account opportunity?
Yeah, look, we have Focus Accounts everywhere. Every country has them. There's not a theme that now, they happen to be we have a fair bit in Europe. We have a fair bit in the U.S. The theme behind the Focus Accounts, though, is more about how much IBM hardware and software is needed in order to deliver because that's the new commercial construct that IBM created. And it's not the only, but it is the single largest element in what we need to address. So the labor component of these is doing very well. We're engineering the decline to deal with the economics that were created for us by IBM and their commercial agreement.
But I wouldn't say there's either a geographic or an industry theme other than industries that are big users of mainframes, for instance, tend to have more Focus Accounts, industries that are more distributed workloads, not as many.
Got it. Thank you for that. Just going back to a minute for Gen AI. We talked about the opportunity on the revenue side. But connected to that, how are you using Gen AI in your own business to improve productivity and drive gross margin and EBITDA expansion?
Yeah, look, it is probably top of mind for most companies today. How do we use it? And then how do we bring it and use it for our customers? So I'll start with sort of the narrower field of Gen AI. And for us, this is an opportunity to help our customers as they think about how do they have to architect their data. At the end of the day, Gen AI is really a data challenge. So we're helping our customers architect their data. We're helping our customers think through the security and the resiliency needs as their data needs to start moving around. All of that shows up in part of our Kyndryl Consult business and represents a revenue and obviously a profit opportunity. Within our own how Kyndryl runs, we finished now at the end of the second anniversary.
We are off all of the IBM Transition Service Agreements, the TSAs. We had a 2-year time frame that they gave us to move all of our systems off. We've taken a massive leap forward in building contemporary fit-for-purpose systems. We've taken our application portfolio from over 1,700 down to a number in the dozens. We use one HR system. We use Workday as an example for everything. We have SAP, where Microsoft's up. So we've simplified our environments. And now is the step of now we get an opportunity to change how we do work because now we have the right systems to support all that. I go through all of that because that's been the enabler for us now to think about and we probably have five or six dozen experiments underway on Gen AI.
How do we use Gen AI to attack paper that's sitting in our processes, to simplify how things get done? And we'll see. We see pretty for a business like ours, contract-based business, some of our contracts with customers are 800 pages long. So we see great opportunity for the kinds of business we have now that we have our systems in a state where they can support the future as opposed to very much being stuck in the past. So that's sort of the Gen AI as a narrow category. But AI more broadly also shows up in our Kyndryl Bridge platform. Kyndryl Bridge is basically in addition, I mean, it does a lot of things.
But one of the things it does is it's machine learning on the biggest pool of infrastructure data that exists that gives insights to customers about how their systems are running, how to optimize what looks like it should be fixed before it becomes a problem. And obviously, it's what we use to automate over 1 billion things a year for our customers. It's what we use to keep our customers more than 90% up to date, if you will, on best practices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Gen AI is a small, at this point, a smaller opportunity. But it is AI broadly. Machine learning is how we deliver services, how we run today.
Two connected questions. The first really is on Kyndryl Consult. And the second is on Kyndryl's position in IT services primarily as a nondiscretionary provider, which makes it somewhat unique in the ecosystem. Perhaps just starting with Kyndryl Consult, which you referenced, 14% of your revenue helped drive, accelerate 13% year-over-year bookings growth. Where are you seeing the biggest demand for Kyndryl Consult's revenue or Kyndryl Consult solutions? And then maybe frame how much of this is in the nondiscretionary bucket versus what you would consider to be discretionary.
Yeah, sure. So a few things. One of the benefits of having full visibility to our customers' infrastructure and having full visibility to their assets and helping optimize that is also it's a demand gen creator for our consult business. And as we sit here today, that is focused on the security and resiliency aspects of their business. So we have a lot of work in security and resiliency in consult. It's around data and architecture opportunities that, again, drive consult. And it's around cloud migration and particularly mainframe modernization. And how do we help our customers think through the mainframe modernization path that many of them are on? So I think that's going to shift over time. Again, Gen AI is going to be a bigger part of the discussion.
But for the role we play in our customers' environments, Mainframe Modernization, security and resiliency, and data sit top of mind. And I don't think that's going to change dramatically. Gen AI will enter the picture. But those three things are what we do. It's what our customers trust us to do. And it's going to drive demand for a long, long they're never going to go away. There's never going to be a recession in security. There's never going to be a recession in resiliency because it's such a critical part of how infrastructure has to run.
Got it. Thank you so much for that. So along those lines, how do you plan to expand Kyndryl Consult's solution set over the next 12 months?
Yeah, look, today, and I mentioned mainframe modernization, security, resiliency, data, et cetera, plays a big role. But we also announced a new partnership with HP Enterprise this week around edge computing and how to bring more of that data in and make sure, again, it's resilient and it's going to be part of a well-run infrastructure. I think that's going to continue to drive more growth for us as well. Then the ability for us to help customers understand the biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges CIOs have, is just understanding what they have, having a full inventory and what's being used and what's not being used. I think is going to become as macro starts to affect more and more their thinking and how do they save money, et cetera, that's the big part of what we can help them with.
So macro is going to affect our customers. Our tools, our AI, and our IP, along with our great engineering talent, is going to help them identify where else they can go find money, which may be not optimized today. So again, macro, we're a bit insulated from it, as you said well. But our customers feel it. And therefore, I think the next phase, if you will, the next wave of Kyndryl Consult will also be about productivity, about helping customers save money.
You recently raised the FY 2024 Advanced Delivery savings target to $550 million. It's still early in the fiscal fourth quarter. What are the biggest drivers to achieve the $550 million? And how are you progressing toward that?
Yeah, I mentioned earlier that we use Kyndryl Bridge to automate a lot of the work that we were doing for our customers. In fact, I think we'll finish this year at 1 billion automations on behalf of our customers for the year. And that's only with Bridge running in about 750 customers. We'll get to 1,000 by the end of this fiscal year. So the path forward from here is not that we need something new to happen. We just need to keep doing what we're doing. And the value that our customers see in Bridge has created a tremendous amount of pull. It takes time, as you would expect. It takes time to get customers to understand the tools. It takes time for our own teams to understand how to use the tools and how do you optimize.
But importantly also, you can't just show up and put things into a customer's environment. It takes time to get them comfortable, understand it, et cetera, et cetera, particularly for regulated businesses. So what we've been able to achieve so far, which has driven terrific benefit, is the same thing that's going to allow us to get to the next level and the next level. Now, as we get back to revenue growth in calendar 2025, what it allows us to do is a lot more without having to the cost profile to go up as much. So it's been very good about helping us save money. And that's good as we've engineered the revenue decline while we're adding gross profit dollars.
But it's also going to be a great tool for us as we get back to revenue growth to allow us to grow revenue but not have to grow the spend at the same rate. So more leverage for us in the future just on getting back to growth. But it's all the things we're doing today.
Understood. Appreciate that. Now, your medium-term target for Advanced Delivery remains $600 million pre-tax profit contribution. By the end of 2024, FY 2024, you'll be nearly 90% to that medium-term target. So what are the tailwinds and headwinds to reaching the $600 million target? And why won't you exceed it?
Look, we may very well exceed this. As I said, the opportunity for us and we are there at the shorter end, as you pointed out well, we're at the shorter end of the three to 5-year time frame as we kind of expect it to be. But we only have Bridge, as I said, in 1,000 customers by the end of this year. There's still a lot more for us to do there. But at the same time, we are a services business. And our engineering talent is a big part of why our customers come to us and stay with us. So it's not endless. It doesn't keep doubling every year. But I do think there's probably more that we can get out of it. But again, it's more about how do we grow faster without having to add to the cost side?
How can we grow faster on the base we have? So I think the opportunity is likely to expand over time. But it's going to be more tied to growth for us.
Just on that point, I know a lot of your cost savings have come from upskilling employees with kind of older programming skills. What about offshoring? Are you far enough along in terms of low-cost offshore or nearshore locations?
We are probably a bit more domestic than offshore than some of others in the marketplace. But at the same time, because of the nature of the infrastructure we're running, that's what our customers want. They want a heavier onshore presence. And that's completely fine with us. We've proven, I think, over the last couple of years that we can still create value. We can still get paid for the great work we're doing. So I don't see the domestic versus offshore mix as being a dramatic driver for us. I do think that now that we've proven that customers are willing to pay for it, it works over the long term for us as well.
That doesn't mean that we're not going to always be looking to see where the best skills are because we're always going to have the work done in the place that has the best engineering talent. So when we look, for instance, at our mainframe skills we've got a few thousand people who know more about mainframes than anybody. Those are in pockets around the world. So mainframe is always going to go to those places, Eastern Europe, some in India, et cetera. But I don't know that that's not an offshore versus domestic discussion. It's really about where are the skills for this particular practice and where are the skills at scale for this particular practice.
Appreciate it. I'll pause for a minute to see if there are any questions from investors. We have a mic. Please raise your hand if you have a question.
Hi, Martin. Thanks for being here. We talked a little bit about the Advanced Delivery initiative. You're almost at the medium-term target. You talked about accounts. It's going to take a little bit longer. But it seems like you are a little bit ahead of schedule, probably, based on this year's target. You talked about I think you guys said that the accounts medium-term target is only half of the margin gap between your Focus and your Blueprint Accounts. So as you've had these conversations, how much of the Focus Accounts do you think that you can convert into the Blueprint Accounts over a longer period of time?
Yeah, look, eventually, every contract ends. So eventually, we get through them all. I will say that we have the benefit of having these very long, deep relationships with customers is obvious. But we have contracts that go out even as we sit here today that only finish in 2032, as an example. So there is a long tail to this. But the bulk of this, we do get through in that five-year period. And again, I think what we've proven and what we want to make sure everybody understands is, one, we can get paid for the work. Customers appreciate the value we bring. And they see it. So they're willing to pay for that value. That's one. Two, the relationships remain intact even if some of the content comes out. Almost every customer is reimagining the relationship. So that will continue over a long period of time.
In fact, we saw in the last quarter now, this will be different in every quarter. But over the last quarter, we had I think we had 13 deals greater than $100 million, whereas we hadn't anywhere near that for the full year of the prior year. So the relationships are getting reoriented. The labor component of the focus account revenue can earn a reasonable return. We're proving that. It really is just getting this content out. And this is the big year for the engineered decline. We've been talking about why it's coming down so aggressively with a little mitigation from the things that are growing. Next year, some of those phenomena that are driving the big decline go away. And obviously, the things that are growing keep growing. And they punch better. So even though some of these contracts go a long time, we're kind of fixing them.
Now, to your point, we're making great progress, I'd say it that way. We made, as you would expect, we had to make a lot of assumptions about when and what's it going to look like and all those things. And that's what I think we're really pleasantly surprised that we've been able to make progress faster than what our assumptions were. But the assumptions we had hold, the customer's willingness to engage, customer's willingness to stay and reimagine these things, customer's willingness to pay for value where they see it, our ability to compete because they benchmark us. Everybody benchmarks us to make sure that we're competitive. Our ability to compete, our ability to bring new thinking and innovation, our ability to show up differently for our customers. All of the assumptions are right.
It's just that they're coming in at a slightly different rate and pace and a little bit faster. But we do get through them eventually. The great power of a business like this, it is a backlog-based business. So you have very good visibility to what's coming. That's the power. But that means you also know that it takes a while to fix the stuff that has to be fixed. So right now, the backlog is what I would say we still have a lot of pre-spin stuff. So the notorious nature of that will turn into a feature because of the ability to predict and see where we're going. Just not there yet.
So closely related to achieving your medium-term pre-tax contribution target for accounts, a shift in your mix of pre and post-spin signings, more toward the higher margin post-spin bookings, where do you stand today in terms of achieving a 50/50 pre and post-spin signings mix in FY 2025 and a 33%-67% signings mix in FY 2026?
Yeah, so I think on March 31st, when we finish the fiscal year, we will know about 80% of what next year's revenue looks like. And within that, there will be still a slightly bigger mix of old backlog versus new backlog, if you will, pre-spin versus post-spin. Then we sign all through next year to work on that other 20% of what we don't know for next year because you sign and start to convert revenue immediately. And that is what drives the total then for next year to be kind of a 50/50 mix in terms of post-spin and pre-spin signings. So we'll know again, the beauty of this business is how much you know about the future. The notorious part, the hard part about this business is that it just takes a while to get things fixed. So we'll know 80% of that 80.
It'll be a bit more pre-spin than post-spin. But everything we sign then next year will bring that next year's total to 50/50. And then the following year, again, similar dynamic. We'll know at the beginning of the following year, we'll know 80%. That will be then more post-spin than pre-spin. And then plus everything we sign in the following year will go into accounts that is obviously post-spin. So we'll be at about 2/3 post-spin and only 1/3 pre-spin. And then the following year gets the 28. So it just keeps declining in our P&L. And so our sharing of the post-spin signings and how that's evolving over time is important for everybody to understand. Again, some of the things we've proven about, you can get paid for the work. It's valuable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So the short answer is 50/50 next year, pre/post, following year, 2/3 post, 1/3 pre. And then it just keeps diminishing.
Speaking of bookings, can you talk a little bit about your sales engine, especially how you go to market? What are the plans for growing the sales force over the next 12-18 months?
Sure. So a couple of things. And it's important to note, I think, that the spin out of IBM created obviously a lot of opportunity for us to partner with the ecosystem that matters. It created a lot of opportunity for us to build new capabilities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We had freedom of action. It also created for us the need to skill dramatically the people who run our relationships because now, whereas IBM would have had sort of the account leadership role and the relationships with CIOs and others, and we would have been in the infrastructure layer, our teams have done, I think, a phenomenal job in a very short period of time of upskilling, of creating the relationships at the right levels, at the decision-maker level, to really understanding what business challenges our customers had, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So the first two years where we've really focused just on our customers, not focused on trying to bring new ones and we've gotten new customers as well. We haven't really spent a lot of time focusing. Our first couple of years have been about getting our talent pool, our culture built to be a higher value consultative-led kind of thinking and showing up differently and bringing innovation, et cetera, et cetera. I think the teams, like I said, have done a phenomenal job. The next step in this process is, and we're out hiring consultants as we speak. The next step in this process is to drive the continued growth. To keep investing in our own capabilities is to keep hiring in the consult space as we keep to fulfill the demand, if you will, that we see coming.
So look, we've had a lot of culture change to get through, not just in go-to-market. But the teams have done a great job. Next step now is to build out more of that consultative-led kind of selling. Being a great engineer is certainly something we have a lot of. Being a great engineer who knows how to bill, you have to teach that. You don't just wake up in the morning and say, oh, I'm billable. So here's a bill. It takes a little while. And so despite the culture change and the time we've spent and invested, we've made great progress. And I think we can now accelerate that both with hiring as well as with continuing to do the things we're doing. And look, the relationships are paying off.
The new ways of engaging with customers, something we call Kyndryl Vital, has really captured the hearts and minds and the attention of our customer base. So I see a really good long-term benefit to the hard work that we did in the beginning to get the organization ready to engage in a different way with new ideas, independent of any one technology provider, and to do that in a way that we can turn into real value-creating opportunity for us. But it doesn't just happen. You've got to make that happen in the organization.
So just pulling this together with your earlier comment on the TSA ending, what is the existing relationship with IBM? I mean, how do you work with IBM kind of day to day? I mean, perhaps a lot of it's outside of a formal contractual relationship. But presumably, there is still overlap in relationships and some need to dialogue.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Look, we show up together in quite a few customers still because most of the portfolio was not just a services customer. And so the relationship now for the long term is always going to be about, how do we work together to get to a win-win-win with our customer base? And I think that is going really, really well. The relationship, though, is down now just to that commercial relationship and how we deal with customers jointly. The ownership that they maintained at the spin, that's been gone now right after a year, the TSAs, which were the second part of that relationship, that's now finished. We finished that in November at the second anniversary. So it's just now the commercial relationship where we are I think we're probably still their biggest customer because of the nature of the relationship they created.
But I think we'll be their biggest customer for a while. I mean, we work together in customer environments. But that's kind of what's left. Now, as we put in our disclosures, there are a series of things that we're still going through a resolution process on that have either occurred at spin or since spin. But we work through those things as you normally commercially would expect two big companies to do. So I think that in I think there are plenty of ways for Kyndryl and IBM to work together to get to good outcomes on both sides. It's what my experience has been. I think we'll find more as we go through time. But they're good in customers soon. And they have a great reputation, I think, with working with customers. And that's what I see. And that's what I hear from our customers as well.
I think it's fine.
Got it. Just shifting to capital allocation. As of December 31st, Kyndryl had a strong balance sheet, $1.7 billion of cash. Debt maturity is well laddered from late 2024 to 2041. What are your capital allocation priorities? And what financial targets in terms of free cash flow do you need to hit before you begin to repurchase stock and potentially pay a dividend?
Yeah, so look, I do think that the nature of this business, the characteristics of a business like ours, backlog-based, is one that can and will consider, how do we return capital to shareholders while still investing in the business? I think that this business has those characteristics, no doubt about it. Two years out of the spin, and as you know, we guided to an at least adjusted $160 million of profit. But that is adjusted. We spent the last two years spending very heavily to get off the TSAs. For instance, we had to pay for some retention programs IBM put in place. So while we're making money on an adjusted basis, you can't spend adjusted cash. You can only spend unadjusted cash.
Next year, we'll have far, far, far fewer adjustments than we had this year because we're now two years beyond the spin date, et cetera. As we keep improving profitability and as we have fewer of the adjustments that needs of the business, I think we get closer to having a discussion about capital return. Like I said, they think the characteristics of this business are one that can both invest and return capital to shareholders. I just don't think we're there yet.
Are there any specific financial milestones we should be looking at in terms of how much free cash flow do you need to generate, what sort of pre-tax margin or pre-tax income? What are the thresholds that you're thinking about?
Yeah, yeah, look, for us, what is critical to our customer base, what is critical to our long-term our customer's ability to stick with us over the long term is obviously quality of our balance sheet. We're investment grade. We will stay investment grade. And when and I don't think, by the way, that as you pointed out well, the balance sheet is quite good. It's not a leverage issue for us. But it is a margin still issue for us. Again, even at an adjusted number, it's only 1% PTI, so PTI adjusted. So I think as we continue to execute, get rating agencies comfortable, continue to improve the story on an unadjusted or a less adjusted basis, then I think we find ourselves in a spot where the discussion is a very logical one. But again, I just don't think we're at that point yet.
What are the business risks that you're most actively monitoring and have plans to mitigate?
Business risks. Look, we operate even though macro is obviously something that we're a bit insulated from. We're not immune. And our customers are impacted by it. So we're always keeping an eye on the macroeconomic conditions on behalf of our customers. And then what's important in this business, if you're going to be the infrastructure services provider over the long term, your customers have to one, they have to see great delivery. We have great delivery. Touch wood, we have great delivery. But they also need to see innovation. And I would say that, and Gen AI is a good example, the ability to create new innovation, the ability to create new technologies happens very, very fast, probably getting faster. The willingness of our customer base to experiment is very high. So we have to be ready to help.
And importantly, we have to be ready to do all the things we do in terms of great delivery if they want to move some of those into a production environment. So our need to be in the ecosystem, our need to partner well, to co-create, our need to keep our own skills moving and along a career path that is very contemporary, you cannot fall behind. Our ability to do that is what we've spent a lot of time on to get ourselves positioned well to do that. We weren't born well that way because we were very narrowly focused in the IBM ecosystem.
But we are spending a lot of time on building. In order to build a great services business, we are spending a lot of time on making sure that we have our career paths and skill paths moving at a rate that can keep up with a market that is probably accelerating in terms of innovation. And again, when a customer decides they want to use some innovation, they are not willing in any way, shape, or form to put that in place and reduce resiliency or reduce service levels or reduce the experience their customers have. So we've got to keep up. I mean, we've got to keep up with an ability to deliver that in a world where technology is advancing. So again, we're doing all the right things to make sure we can.
I believe that the depth of our engineering talent and our engineering culture is a huge advantage for us. At the end of the day, we make things work. That's what we do. And we know our customer systems better than ever. But that's a constant to be up to speed, latest and greatest, skills, make it work, again, at a tolerance level that says, if it's going into production, it's always got to work. A bank's core banking system can't decide, I'm going to use GenAI. And it doesn't have to work all the time. It doesn't work that way. Same with health care companies, same with airlines. I mean, these are all the things we run. So our ability to keep up is sort of top of mind for us.
Appreciate that. I'll just pause for a minute to see if we have any final questions from investors.
Told a very compelling story on the progress that the team has made in terms of just upselling with clients and you kind of rising amongst their importance. Has that success been recognized by IBM to the point where you're seeing more amenable terms to help you achieve those gross profit targets?
The commercial relationship that IBM created when they spun us out is, by and large, exactly the same as it was with a couple of small exceptions. So when they spun us out, we got what the common industry term best commercial price for those that do what we do. And that hasn't changed. Our software discounts haven't changed. In fact, our software discounts, the way they've structured it, they get $200 million extra a year. That ends next year. So we'll be through that. But the basics of that agreement haven't changed. It's a three-year agreement. And we have not yet broached with them, nor have they broached with us, redoing the software agreement. That's the bulk of what and that hasn't really changed. There's no difference. Now, we did renegotiate some elements of the commercial relationship. For instance, we renegotiated the maintenance contract last year already.
And we're renegotiating parts of the cloud consumption contract. So little pieces of it haven't changed. But by and large, the contract they created is still in place. And neither us nor them have approached the other to open it up.
Martin, greatly appreciate your insights, participation in our conference. Thanks again to Lori Chaitman, head of the IR effort, and Bobby Grau. Really delighted to have you participate in the conference.
Thank you, David. Appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.