James A. Morgado
Analyst · JPMorgan
Yes. Thanks, Adam. And Joyce, you can round out my comments. But Adam, I think when you think about the full year guide and the second half, you kind of have to start back how the first half landed. I'll take the major areas of the business. First, from a cloud standpoint, cloud landed in the first half at our expectations. I called out a couple of quarters ago that, that we were going to be faced this year with a $70 million gross headwind, which was in cloud, which was more weighted towards the first half. And we -- and landing at our expectations gives us a good setup, I think, for the second half. Additionally, when we look at our cloud business, we look at Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service has been growing nicely. Q2 was at a similar rate to the Q1 rate, which I think also gives us a good setup for the second half. And so that's why from a cloud perspective, we're able to hold our view that cloud would be flat to slightly down. The second key piece of this, as you mentioned, was around hardware. Hardware in the first quarter grew 1% from a GP standpoint. Q2 accelerated a little bit to 2%. We didn't see pull-ins, as others have mentioned. We saw some, but it wasn't material to the number. And so that dynamic hasn't really played out for us in the first half, like you may hear from others. Additionally, as we looked at bookings in Q2 and as Q3 has started, I think it supports the premise that hardware will continue to accelerate as we get into the second half. When you look at our commercial business, for example, it's 5 quarters of consecutive growth. Corporate and enterprise from a bookings standpoint as the first half has progressed, has improved. And Q3 as well, as we started would support the fact that corporate and enterprise will continue to pick up in the second half. The third piece to this, which is the reason that you'll see that we've moderated our GP outlook is around our core services business. It started below our expectations that we had at the beginning of the year. We've moderated that down to the low single digits, which implies some modest pickup into the second half. And the reason that we're able -- when you take all those factors together, the reason we're able to hold our earnings per share was around the performance of OpEx. In the first half, OpEx was down 4% year-over-year, which was ahead of our expectations. And we would -- as we plan out for the second half and for the full year, OpEx would grow slower than gross profit. And those are the reasons that we're effectively holding our EPS.