Incentives

CF: Can you elaborate on what those efforts and incentives will translate to?

DLR: We haven’t defined this completely, but I’ll give some direction on where we’re heading. Today, we pay our partners when they transact with us on hardware or software portfolio. We are still one of the most profitable vendors in the industry, and our partners continue to tell us that. What they’ve also told us though, is we are missing out on helping them to differentiate our portfolio at the early stages of when a client is making critical decisions around their cloud, around their security portfolio and around their data portfolio. That’s one of the things we’re looking at doing when we talk about modernizing the program. They’ve also said, “We’ve competed with your GTS [IBM Global Technology Services, now Kyndryl] or your managed services business for years and so we no longer have that competitive threat. How can we help land your platform and ensure that it’s sticky with your clients and our clients?” Focusing on the deployment of our platform is an important area we are looking at.