Global Business Services Segment
Turning to Global Business Services, revenue declined six percent, consistent with last quarter.
As you’ll recall, prior to the pandemic, GBS was growing revenue and signings. Since March, our revenue has reflected the economic environment and a change in client priorities, leading to project delays, and less demand for more discretionary offerings. But as we pivot our offerings and delivery to address these client needs, GBS posted double-digit signings growth in the third quarter, and returned its backlog to growth. This was driven by cloud strategy, application development and modernization, and offerings that use data and AI to transform workflows. As I mentioned earlier, our GBS cloud signings were up over 25 percent. We signed a number of large transformational contracts with a total value greater than $100M, which will yield revenue over time. Our small deal performance generally followed the pandemic curve by geography but returned to growth overall for the quarter.
With the expertise and process knowledge gained through our application management incumbency, clients trust us to guide them through architectural decisions and facilitate their transformations, with a particular expertise in application modernization at scale across all on prem, private and public cloud environments.
GBS drives adoption of IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and is a gateway to bring the wider set of IBM capabilities to enable a client’s digital journey. For example, about one-third of Cloud Pak revenue results from GBS engagements. And, this quarter, we added another 60 Red Hat client engagements with such clients as Delta Airlines, which Arvind mentioned