Louis Gerstner Services Quotations

On the positive side, our services revenue grew by nearly $1 billion and this business made a major contribution to the company's earnings. Our software revenues showed good growth and the software gross margin improved for the fifth consecutive quarter,

These results show the ongoing strength of our broad business portfolio, ... We saw very good customer response to our new System/390 servers and continuing strength in services and hard disk drives.

Services is clearly the largest and fastest-growing portion of the information technology industry, and we continue to extend our leadership position each quarter, ... Our software business continues to gain momentum.

On a positive note, our services business continued to overtake the Y2K pause that pressured the first half of the year, ... Our PC business rebounded strongly, with particularly good demand for our server and ThinkPad products. In addition, our business in Asia continued to grow strongly.