Kyndryl Holdings, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fiscal First Quarter 2027 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Lori Chaitman, Global Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Kindrel's earnings call for the first fiscal quarter, June 30th, 2026. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that our remarks today include forward-looking statements. These statements do not guarantee future performance and speak only as of today, and the company assumes no obligation to update its forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Actual outcomes or results may differ materially from those suggested by forward-looking statements as a result of risks and uncertainties. For more information on some of these risks and uncertainties, please see the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2026, and as such, factors may be updated from time to time in the company's subsequent filings with the SEC. Also in today's remarks, we refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Definitions and additional information about our calculation of Non-GAAP Financial Metrics, as well as a Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Metrics to GAAP Metrics for Historical Periods are provided in the presentation materials for today's event, which are available on our website at investors.kyndryl.com. Following up prepared remarks will hold a Q&A session. I'd now like to turn the call over to Kyndryl's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Martin Schroeter.

Thank you, Lori, and thanks to each of you for joining us. In the first quarter, we executed on our key priorities and made progress in our targeted growth areas supported by continued strengths in the United States. Signings and revenue grew in Kindrel Consult, and we continued to see positive momentum with hyperscalers. We continue to invest in the areas where we see opportunity, Kindrel Consult, our alliance partnerships, and our agentic AI capabilities through Kindrel Bridge and our IP, to support and modernize our customers' most complex mission-critical IT estates. And at the same time, we took actions to further streamline our operations. While there is more work ahead, our strategic priorities remain clear. We're focused on delivering our fiscal 2027 outlook and our 2028 objectives. With more revenue expected to come from higher margin post-spin signings this year and next, the quality of that revenue base gives us confidence in our ability to increase profitability and deliver more than 1.2 billion in adjusted pre-tax income and a billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2028. And these targets can be achieved on low single-digit constant currency revenue growth. Harsh will provide more detail in a few minutes on our recent financial results and our outlook. Last quarter, we outlined the priorities that support our fiscal 2028 targets. As we highlighted, we entered the fiscal year with a five-point improvement in beginning backlog versus fiscal 2026. And four months into the year, Our pipeline consists of more scope expansions and new logos that support future signings growth and better mix of higher value services. AI, modernization, and cyber preparedness remain important priorities for enterprises around the world as they balance innovation and transformation with operational stability in an uncertain macro environment. This is driving demand for Kindrel Consult with signings exceeding revenue over the last 12 months. These same dynamics are creating opportunities across our Alliance ecosystem with customers' modernization needs accelerating demand in both public and private cloud. We continue to sign deals with average projected pre-tax margins in the high single digits, reflecting our focus on higher value services and pricing disciplines central to our transformation. Through our advanced delivery initiative, we are embedding more automation and AI into our operations Improving productivity and upscaling our teams for higher-value work. And with Kindle Bridge, our AI-powered services delivery platform, we're providing our customers with the technology foundation to deploy, govern, and orchestrate AI agents' energetic workflows across complex IT estates. In parallel, we're taking workforce rebalancing actions to address lower-than-normal voluntary attrition and our SG&A costs, with savings expected to begin in the back half of this year. We'll continue to share our progress against these signposts as we drive our business toward our multi-year objectives. I want to focus my discussion on total signings performance. While our customers remain thoughtful and deliberate in their IT decision-making, we're seeing demand for AI-led modernization, especially where Kindrel Consult and our hyperscaler alliances help customers address their mission-critical needs. We're encouraged that over the last six months, our total signings have exceeded our revenue. Deal size and composition are additional proof points that demonstrate how we're executing our strategy. Over the last 12 months, we signed 40 deals in excess of $50 million, of which 10 were signed in the first quarter. And among these 40 large deals, approximately 30% of their value consists of scope expansion or our new logos, which compares to 15% in fiscal 2025. Strong Science and Kindrel Consult and Momentum and Hyperscalers are translating to revenue growth in these targeted areas. Kindle Consult revenue grew 14% and hyperscaler-related revenue streams grew 48% in the last 12 months on a year-over-year basis. Performance in Kindle Consult and hyperscalers has partially offset the revenue headwinds from focus accounts over the last few years and, more recently, lengthening sales cycles and customers' decisions to procure hardware and software directly from IBM. Kindrel Consult's results demonstrate broad demand from enterprises looking to design and scale agentic AI across their business workflows, modernize complex hybrid IT environments, and strengthen cybersecurity and resilience. To meet that demand, we've been expanding our consulting skills and capabilities, including investments in forward deploy engineers, human systems architects, and AI innovation labs, where we co-create agentic solutions at scale with our Kindrel agentic framework. To further address customers' modernization and AI needs, we've been expanding our relationships with our alliance partners. Recently, we expanded our alliance with AWS to help enterprises adopt and scale agentic AI as they modernize and run mission-critical workloads in the cloud. We also expanded our work with Microsoft Azure to help customers design, build, and operate cloud architectures that align with evolving data residency and operational requirements. And we continue to strengthen collaborations with partners such as Broadcom and Dell, HP Enterprise and Red Hat to support customers modernization efforts in complex private and hybrid cloud environments. AI is accelerating the need for modernization. Every day I speak with business and technology leaders in different industries and nearly every customer conversation comes back to the same long term themes. First, Enterprises are eager to realize the benefits of AI, but many are trying to deploy next generation technologies on infrastructure applications and processes that were not designed for them. As you've heard me say before, it's like trying to run a new 200 mile per hour capable bullet train on tracks built for 30 mile per hour world. Equally challenging, as our Kindrel People Readiness Report found, there's also a lack of skills as only 23% of business leaders said their workforce is ready for AI. The need for Kindrel's expertise and modernization capabilities to continue running their business while transforming it, that run and transform and run approach, is where Kindrel is differentiated. Second, AI, cybersecurity, and data residency regulations and mandates are becoming fundamental considerations in how customers plan and invest in IT. Enterprises increasingly want greater control over their data, their AI models, and their digital infrastructure. And Kindrel helps our customers navigate and build technology foundations that can adapt to the evolving regulatory requirements, geopolitical realities, and business needs over the long term. Third, and related to the previous theme, cybersecurity and resilience remain top priorities. As agentic AI becomes more powerful, as we've seen with recent frontier models and further embedded into how enterprises operate, our customers need strong guardrails and policies to bolster the governance and security of their critical systems. This is especially important in the highly regulated emission-critical environments where Kindrel has deep expertise in governing and securing data across complex hybrid environments and adhering to unique compliance requirements. Fourth, customers increasingly want open and interconnected platforms for flexibility and choice across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments. As technology ecosystems become even more diverse and interconnected, Organizations need agile platforms that integrate seamlessly across environments and applications, enabling interoperability, reducing vendor lock-in, and accelerating innovation. And finally, while most AI investments were initially justified through productivity gains, customers are increasingly looking beyond efficiency toward growth, toward speed, and toward new business outcomes. These are structural and durable trends that leverage our heritage and expertise in mission-critical IT infrastructure, our ecosystem, Kindrel Bridge, and our differentiated portfolio of agentic AI capabilities. We're helping customers simplify complexity and build technology environments that can adapt as business, regulatory, and technology requirements evolve while improving resilience, security, and operational performance. Now let's talk about three tangible examples of how we're helping customers deliver business outcomes across the modernization continuum using an agentic AI approach. First, with a large global payments company that we've been working with for decades, the challenge wasn't deciding to modernize. It was to better understand the complexities and dependencies across decades of mission-critical mainframe applications to modernize effectively, maximize their ROI, and drive the agility and scale that the business required. We expanded our scope to roll out Kindryl's agentic modernization platform with prepackaged AI modernization workflows, which can be scaled to support multiple customer teams globally carrying out modernization work. We deployed our engineers to develop additional AI workflows to meet the customer's unique modernization and tech stack needs. Next, we expanded our scope with a leading European financial institution to transform its operations and technology while improving efficiency and meeting increasingly complex regulatory requirements. This customer wants to modernize applications, infrastructure, and operations at the same time, not as separate initiatives. We're bringing together Kindrel Consult, Kindrel Bridge, and our managed services expertise to implement an AI-native agentic banking platform. This end-to-end modernization effort will automate its operations, strengthen security and resilience, improve overall decision making, and enhance the customer experience. And then we were recently awarded a new logo with a global technology company to help streamline software engineering and IT operations using the Kindrel agentic AI framework. This will help them grow while improving security, resilience, and speed. By combining Kindrel's expertise in agentic software development, platform engineering, and IT operations, we will deliver a scalable, secure, and efficient technology foundation that supports their expanding edge AI global business while reducing deployment complexity and operational risk. In all three examples, our AI-led modernization approach is accelerating transformation timeline and improving efficiency, strengthening the resilience of their mission-critical technology environments. We rewarded NuScope with each of these customers and now expect to expand into new areas, demonstrating the breadth of our capabilities and importantly, creating opportunities to deepen and expand our long-term strategic relationships with our customers. We're a trusted advisor and a long-term partner for our customers with differentiated solutions that center on achieving tangible business results. With the expectation that higher value signings continue to improve, our focus is clear. Drive profitable growth and stronger free cash flow. And with that, I'd like to pass the call over to Harsh to discuss our quarterly results and our fiscal year outlook. Harsh.

Thanks, Martin, and hello, everyone. Today, I will focus my comments on our first quarter results and outlook for fiscal year 2027. In Q1, we generated $3.6 billion of revenue, down 3% year over year on both a reported and constant currency basis. For the second consecutive quarter, we delivered 5% revenue growth in the U.S., as our AI-led modernization approach continues to resonate with our customers. We exited the period with 12-month signings of 14.2 billion, of which 3.9 billion was signed in Q1. As Martin noted, it was encouraging to see signings gain momentum as we exited the March quarter and kicked off our new fiscal year. Our adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $512 million, and our adjusted pre-tax loss was $37 million. The year-over-year declines in earnings and margin were primarily driven by $152 million of workforce rebalancing charges incurred in the quarter. These charges had more than a four-point impact on adjusted pre-tax income margin in the quarter. Our three A's initiative had become We continue to expect hyperscalers to be a positive contributor to revenue and earnings growth going forward. Through advanced delivery, we are embedding more AI-based technology into our services through Kindle Bridge, driving continuous productivity improvements, reducing cost, and further increasing our already strong service levels. And while the work to address focus accounts Through our accounts initiative is largely behind us, the discipline we developed continues to inform how we pursue higher value growth. Through scope expansions, new logos, our expanding consulting and adjuncting AI capabilities in our broad alliance ecosystem. I want to provide an update on what we have been sharing on our evolving partnership with IBM. largely driven by how customers are consuming IBM innovation. This chart illustrates a three-point adverse impact on revenue performance in constant currency driven by our focus accounts initiative in earlier years and more recently by this evolving relationship. As we have described before, at the time of the spinoff, Approximately 40% of revenue from our inherited commercial agreements were in a low to no margin position. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this, when we were spun off, the annualized run rate of our spend with IBM was nearly $4 billion. Over the past four years, we have addressed most of the focus accounts leading to improved profitability gains. In fact, Our spend with IBM over the last 12 months was less than $2 billion, less than half of the spend since we spun off. During fiscal 2026, especially in second half, customers increasingly procured certain IBM hardware and software directly from IBM, while continuing to rely on Kinro for high-value services. That pattern has continued into fiscal 2027, and is creating a similar headwind to our top line performance over the last 12 month period. Importantly, these changes do not affect the scope or margin profile of our services or our ability to grow services content over time. However, they do reduce the size of our signings and consequently our revenue growth over time. And as we have said, This has limited impact on our earnings. Our outlook for fiscal 2027 continues to be based on the assumption that we'll see similar headwinds throughout the remainder of the year. Turning to cash flow, as a reminder, our first quarter is a seasonal use of cash driven by working capital timing. This year, free cash flow was 401 million outflow. Compared to the same period a year ago, We had higher payments related to multi-year renewals and annual prepaid office subscriptions and lower billing and collections. This was partially offset by lower broad-based annual incentive compensation payments. Importantly, working capital dynamics were contemplated in our full-year fiscal 2027 outlook. As we move through the year, we expect meaningfully higher earnings, particularly in second half, and stronger working capital to drive free cash flow. While quarter to quarter dynamics can vary, we continue to target a strong conversion of earnings to free cash flow on a full year basis. We have provided a bridge from our adjusted pre-tax income to our free cash flow, as well as a bridge from our adjusted EBITDA to our free cash flow in the appendix and more information on the free cash flow metric calculation. Our financial position remains strong. Our cash balance at June 30th was $2.1 billion. Our debt maturities are well-laddered from late 2026 to 2041. We plan to refinance or use cash on hand to fund our near-term debt maturity of $700 million. Our net leverage ratio exiting the quarter was 0.8 times and our investment grade rating was recently reaffirmed by Fitch, Moody's, and S&P. Under the share repurchase authorization, we bought 5 million of shares of common stock at a cost of 64 million in the first quarter. Since the inception of the program, we have repurchased 8% of our outstanding shares. On capital allocation, our top priorities are to maintain an investment rate balance sheet and financial flexibility. We have remained focused on winning business with healthy margins, which takes significant discipline as enterprises prolong decision-making. Over the last four years, we have signed contracts with projected gross margin in the mid-20s and projected pre-tax margins in the high single digits. We have again included a gross profit book to bill chart that illustrates how we have been creating and capturing value in our business. With an average projected gross margin of 25% on signings over the last 12 months, we have added more gross profit dollars to our backlog than we have reported as gross profit over the same period. Having a gross profit book-to-bill ratio at or above one demonstrates the quality of post-fin signings and the expected future profit growth from committed contracts. And as Martin highlighted, new scope and new logos continue to increase as a percent of our large deal signings. Turning to our outlook for fiscal 2027, we continue to expect adjusted pre-tax income to be in the range of $600 million to $700 million. This pre-tax income outlook includes approximately $200 million of workforce rebalancing charges and a similar amount of savings associated with these actions to offset the charges. In fiscal 2028, these actions are expected to yield annualized savings in the range of $400 to $500 million. Looking at the second quarter, we expect adjusted pre-tax income to be relatively in line with the $123 million we deported last year, which includes more workforce rebalancing charges compared to the prior year. The progress we are making on our workforce actions are on track to what we have previously outlined. For the full year, we continue to expect our free cash flow in the range of $400 million to $500 million. We continue to expect revenue to be flat to down 2% in constant currency with year-over-year trends projected to improve each quarter. Within that, we expect Kindrel Consult and our alliances-related revenue streams will continue to grow, while at the same time, As I discussed earlier, we're assuming that our evolving relationship with IBM will be a similar headwind to what we have been experiencing. Taking into consideration the pace of signings over the last 15 months and what we expect to sign in the second quarter, we expect our second half 2027 revenue to be stronger than the first half. Let me now pass the call back to Martin.

Thank you, Harsh. To wrap up, we are executing against a clear strategy in a market where customers need trusted partners to modernize mission-critical environments, adopt AI, and navigate increasing complexity. We're seeing momentum in the areas that matter most, Kindrel Consult, hyperscalers, alliance-led growth, and AI-led modernization. Our differentiated capabilities, including Kindrel Bridge and Agentic AI, are helping customers deliver tangible business outcomes while creating opportunities to expand our relationships. At the same time, we continue to improve the quality of our signings, embed automation into our operations, and drive greater efficiency across the business. Taken together, these actions give us confidence in our ability to deliver on our fiscal 2027 and our fiscal 2028 targets. Operator, let's now move on to questions.

Thank you, Martin. At this time, we'll conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, To ask a question, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Jonathan Lee with Guggenheim Security. Jonathan, your line is open.

Great, thanks for taking my questions. Can you help us think through what's contemplated in the fiscal 27 outlook across the key moving pieces, specifically the assumed consult growth pace, the level of signings conversion assumed, and any embedded assumptions around sales cycle duration? Where do you see the biggest sources of upside and downside relative to the flat to down to constant currency revenue outlook range?

Sure, thank you, and thanks for the time this morning. A couple of comments. I'll ask Harsh, obviously, if he wants to add anything to my answer. So first, let's start where you did, which is on consult. At the beginning of the year when we provided our guidance, revenue guidance, we said consult would be kind of high single, low double digit. And I think, you know, we just printed a 10. So we feel very good about the start we had to stay within that range and have consult deliver what we've embedded in our initial guidance. Additionally, we feel really good about the signings in the first quarter. As everybody knows, you know, we have to keep the signings machine going and the 50% growth in consult in the first quarter says our assumption for the years, it looks quite good. I would add to that, by the way, that in addition to the first quarter where we had good consult growth, I'd also say that we had a good July in signing. So I think we feel like we're on track to Thank you for joining us. Given what we do and the role we play in our customers' environments, our customers are making long-term decisions, and so that hasn't changed. At the same time, we run mission critical, we run their hearts and lungs, so there's a big component of trust in how our customers make decisions, and that hasn't changed. At the same time, the world's getting more complex, and since we had our last earnings call, for instance, Mithos was announced, and that's certainly captured the attention of the enterprise tech world. So our customers are making long-term decisions on mission-critical elements, and the complexity of technology and what they're thinking through is still ever-present. Is there, you know, in certain instances, is there a new dynamic, like sovereignty, for instance, in Europe? Sure, that's a discussion that leads into the overall sales cycle. But I wouldn't say that we're seeing dramatically different sales cycles Again, relative to the role we play in the world on long-term commitments, the role of trust in running mission critical, and the complexity of technology. Harsh, anything to add?

Yeah, there's a couple of things I would add. We continue to see momentum in a hyperscaler, kind of that we have continued to see, and I think The higher value elements that we have in our signings, once again, the new scope and new logo, it continued at a pace of 30%, as Martin mentioned in his prepared remarks, compared to 2025 fiscal, which was like 15%. And we do see a good mix of pipeline for new scope and new logo as we look forward as well.

Great.

Appreciate the thorough responses there.

Thank you.

Thanks, Jonathan. Operator, next question, please.

Our next question will be from Kevin Krishnaratna with Scotiabank. Kevin, your line's open.

Hey there. Good morning. Good strength, you know, continued strength in the U.S., but I want to switch to the principal markets and maybe Europe is down 8% cost of currency, 7% last quarter. I mean, I think that's expected. You did talk last quarter about some of the headwinds on AI sovereignty and buying decisions, but Just curious, was that ahead or below your expectations, and how do you see trends out of Europe evolving into Q2, Q3?

Yeah, so a couple things. It is all consistent with what we've assumed as we started the year and still supports our guidance for the full year. And the trends, as I just talked about, that we see in terms of deal closings and cycle times are not a lot different. Again, does Europe sometimes have a sovereignty discussion? It does sometimes, but by and large, it's the complexity of the environments that our customers are dealing with. It's the choices they have. And they know that while they need to commit over the long term to kindle, to run their infrastructure mission critical, they also know that in three months, somebody can make an announcement that changes the world of AI again. It's all of these things that I think come to a head a little bit more so in Europe than here in the U.S. Obviously, the world changes here in the U.S. as well, but the sovereignty issue is not at all an issue here in the U.S. The short answer is all consistent with what we assumed for our guidance. We're not seeing any trends, if you will, that would suggest the deal cycles are getting longer. It's just the world in which we live, and it's the role we play in our customers.

I think it's consistent with what we had talked about if you remember in last couple of quarters we had talked about UK as well as the European segment of strategic markets like that that has been kind of what we have continued to see so it was as we were anticipating and not impacting our view for what we see the full year. Thank you.

Thanks. Operator, next question please.

Our next question will be from Tenjin Huang with JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Hey, terrific. Thanks so much. Hi, Martin. Hi, Harsh and Lori. Just thinking about the workforce in general, so you've got robust signings, you've got some savings on the way from the workforce rebalancing. I'm curious if you can just comment on Resourcing or headcount and just your line of sight there and rescaling and lining up the workforce to deliver on the AI-led modernization and the value-added services work that you're focusing on. Do you feel good about the pathway there? I would expect you'll probably see some increase in revenue per head or PTI per head, but just, again, just look for more detail there.

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Tingen. A couple of comments, and again, I'll invite Harsh if he wants to add anything. Our use of AI, which we've talked about for a number of years already, starting with the machine learning we use from the bridge data that we have in order to automate things, now moving into an agentic world. And for us, we have 1,800 or so agents in the infrastructure helping us get to solutions faster, helping us reduce Impact Events helping us reduce errors, helping us automate things. So it's very real for us. And it is something that allows us to free up people and reposition them in higher value roles, still with a customer base that trusts them. And so we've been very successful in doing that. I think we've redeployed in tens of thousands of people. Since we since we started this process and I expect that to continue there is a chance that agentic can accelerate some of that but we're just assuming that we can continue to free people up and redeploy them and remember our business model is one that's paid on outcomes so you know we have to deliver uptime we have to deliver resiliency features we have to deliver security features and I think what we've proven to to ourselves to our customers and and to our investors is that as we as we As long as we continue to deliver on those outcomes, and again, agentic and automation actually improves quality, improves the way we deliver, we get to keep a piece of the savings we can generate as we manage those contracts. And I think our customers see the benefit in efficiency. They see the benefit in quality. And I think that is part of how we've generated about a billion in cumulative savings since we were spun out using, again, machine data, Kindle Bridge, and our ability to automate in our advanced delivery initiative. All while our net promoter scores on the run part of our business, which is what our customers are really looking at, continues to improve. We're in world-class territory. on NPS. We're in world-class territory on quality of service. So look, the use of AI, the use now of agentic is very real for us. It's how our advanced delivery part of our strategy has generated a lot of value. And our model is one, again, that allows us to continue down this path and continue to redeploy. Harsh, anything you did?

Yeah, I would say kind of some of the deals that you heard Martin talk about. I think it's important to talk about the value that we bring through the forward deploy engineers that we bring as well as the identification that we bring in. That's kind of helping us win against some of our competition because some of the insights that we have on the existing environments is unique from our point of view. That's kind of giving us an edge in some of the new scope, new logo that we've won. but also we know how to kind of manage our bench like in terms of reskilling and redeployment kind of we have a great success rate in redeployment. We started to have great success in reskilling resources and then we now as we talked about exiting kind of last year into this year importance of workforce management that we're doing which allows us to manage the cost of something that's kind of stranded like so that's kind of allowing us to kind of think about this as a more holistic way that we are approaching it, and you cannot miss gentrification as an important element of that.

Thanks, Sanjay.

Operator, next question, please. At this time, I'd just like to give a final reminder. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait to be announced. It looks like our next question will be with Bradley Clark from BMO Capital Markets. Bradley, your line is open.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I want to hone in on some of the new logos that were highlighted on the call and specifically won the presentation. But more broadly, in this competitive environment, how is Kindle approaching new logos and what What do you think your advantages lie as you win new customers, particularly in the consulting business? And then if you could also comment on any pricing dynamics that Kindle is experiencing approaching new logos for some of these services versus what you're seeing more in renewals with your existing customers. Thank you.

Yeah, sure. Thank you. Thanks for joining and thanks for the question. Look, We've had, and we've talked about this already at our Investor Day a couple years ago, we've added hundreds and hundreds of new customers, and that certainly doesn't surprise us. We win for a number of reasons, and the most recent wins are tied to our leadership with the Kindrel-Legendic Framework, which allows which allows, provides the architecture and the delivery framework so that our customers, we can really industrialize both, not both, but the design and the integration and then the operations of their infrastructure. So the kindred agentic framework is highly unique, highly differentiated in the marketplace. Supported by Bridge. Bridge is the control plane, if you will, that connects the tools and the workflows and the telemetry and the automation across the enterprise. It provides us with real-time data and provides our customers with 16, 17, 18 million insights a month on how their infrastructure is running. And it also provides us with over 200 million automations a month. and then all of that supported by our expertise and our engineering talent in the form of Kindrel Consult. And some of that we've had, but we've also been very active and very aggressive in investing in Kindrel Consult to get industry expertise and industry points of view, to get the talent that we need in order to help the Kindrel Authentic Framework and bridge land in the right spot. And that expertise has proven to be hugely valuable and is why you see the great consult signings growth that we've delivered over the last number of years and the continued revenue growth. These are very complex, as you would imagine, infrastructures. And it's not that when AI comes along or when agentic AI comes along that our customers are adding a model or a new application. I mean, these are models and agents and workflows and applications that need data and they need to sit on an infrastructure and somebody, and this is why our customers call us, somebody needs to integrate and orchestrate and govern and operate that in a world that is highly complex and at scale. And so, you know, what the expertise we've built, the investments we've made, not only in our people, but in Bridge and our entanglement framework, is highly differentiated in the marketplace, and that's why we see a good long-term growth arc for Kindrel.

Thanks, Martin. Operator, I believe we have one more question in the queue, and then Martin's going to close us out with some remarks.

Thank you, Lori. Our next question is with Spencer Anson from Susquehanna. Spencer, your line is open.

Great, thanks for taking my question here. There's been a lot of talk over the years about mainframe modernization and COBOL modernization. Can you just talk to the opportunity you see there, how it might affect your business, and any impact to the relationship to IBM? Thank you.

Yeah, sure. So look, mainframe modernization is a thing. It's real. It's something we're experts in. We have more scale than anybody else in mainframe and mainframe services. And that scale allows us to invest and create career paths for that next generation of mainframe talent. So we have you know eight nine thousand deep mainframe experts but those eight or nine thousand look more like my kids instead of me because we've invested and partnered with universities to build curriculums etc etc etc so so our scale gives us an ability to invest there in what is a very common and important set of dialogues with our customers modernization mainframe being one of those but modernization in general is sort of the top of the list on what customers are thinking about. You heard some of this in their prepared remarks. Modernization in order to use the new technologies that are coming out like AI, in order to stay ahead of the bad guys and become more secure and resilient, and in order to keep up with an ever-changing regulatory environment. So modernization of which, again, mainframe is one where we have more scale than anybody. We, I think, run more than half the world's outsourced mainframes. So we're really good at this, and it is driving a lot of interest from customers because, again, I've used this metaphor before, AI and gen AI and agentic AI represents a nice, shiny new bullet train that can go 200 miles an hour, but most customers are still running on tracks that were built for 30 miles an hour. So that is sort of a way to capture this idea of modernization. As for the relationship with IBM, look, our relationship with IBM, it's quite good. It continues to evolve. We spent the first few years working very cooperatively and closely with IBM and our customers to execute our focus account initiative. We're largely through that, not entirely. Some of these have long tails, but we've worked very well with IBM and our customer base in order to execute that. And even today, we're lined up with IBM to help customers get to the right answer. By the way, that right answer is quite often a mainframe. And quite often, by the way, we have to modernize in a way that allows customers to continue to deliver the services. So modernization is real. Mainframe is one of those flavors. We have the scale and the investments and the capabilities that nobody else has to do this and it's been a it's been a partnership with IBM has been good and I expect it will continue to be quite good because our customers you know they need IBM's technology just like they need access to public clouds and all the other complexity we manage.

I think the other other other thing that I would add is can I eventually customers will decide depending on their business needs kind of what what business modernization they need and where the IT environment for them will go it's important that we we are bringing all the capabilities and high value services to follow their wallet share which is important to us which means largely the whole ecosystem we have to be relevant for all the the ecosystem players in some cases mainframe including private cloud would remain relevant for them so they have to exist especially the customers that we deal with they exist in all such environment and they will evolve around cloud, public cloud, they'll evolve around SaaS-based application, they will evolve around private cloud and mainframe. So there is a relevance that we have to bring across and modernization for us means we're playing across all the spectrum.

Thanks, Harsh. Operator, I think that was the last in the queue. So before we close, a couple of notes. One, I do want to thank Harsh for stepping into the CFO role and leading our finance organization and being a critical leader here in Kindral for the past six months. And of course, before that, he was our first COO. And after a distinguished career, Harsh has made the decision to retire. Now, he will continue as an executive advisor here to me and to the leadership team. And from the very beginning, from The start of Kindrel, Harsh has been a trusted partner. He's been an exceptional leader who always puts the success of our customers, the success of the Kindrels around the world, and quite frankly, the success of Kindrel first. So Harsh, thank you for your leadership. I have nothing but gratitude and thanks for you. Now, as we announced in July, we're pleased to welcome Ellen Johnson as our incoming CFO. Ellen, highly experienced in driving financial discipline, operational excellence, and she is a great addition to strengthen our leadership team. Ellen officially starts in the role tomorrow, August 6th, and I know she's looking forward to meeting with our investors, our analysts in the coming weeks and months. So welcome, Ellen. Thank you. And again, every day we deliver the world-class services our customers and the world relies on. Our focus this year is to drive progress across the targeted growth areas of our business, including Kindrel Consult, the work we do around the hyperscalers, our modernization efforts. It's come up a number of times, and obviously the role of AI in how our customers deploy it and also how we use it to streamline the way we operate. We've got a great team around the world that's focused on delivering every day. We are and have been confident in our ability to deliver the year and to deliver our multi-year objectives. So thanks everyone for joining.

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