IBM (NYSE:$IBM) investors may be back on the bandwagon as the Big Blue reported third-quarter results that exceeded analyst expectations by a healthy margin. The top line was especially important, as skeptics usually point to Big Blue’s 22 straight quarters of declining revenue as evidence of a rapidly eroding business.

To everyone’s pleasant surprise, the company’s revenue of $19.5 billion beat analyst expectations by a significant $550 million. To be exact, this figure was still down year-over-year, but only by a hair of 0.4%, suggesting a bottoming of IBM’s revenue trajectory, and the possibility of the long-awaited-for return to growth. So, what’s the key driver behind IBM’s recent comeback?

For starters, their strategic imperatives as a whole grew 10% year over year, a marked improvement over the second quarter’s 5% growth. They now create 45% of IBM’s revenue, up from 43% in Q2. Each segment displayed strong growth, with an acceleration in the largest segments of analytics and cloud. As the company moves towards a software-as-a-service model, it should experience increasing margins.

Another particular standout was IBM’s new mainframe computer, the z14 system, which was only released for the last two weeks of September. Mainframes are the refrigerator-sized supercomputers that the world’s biggest businesses use for processing their most sensitive transactions and data. The new product from IBM sees full encryption capabilities without human intervention, and without a degradation in performance.

IBM also posted a great quarter in terms of benefits from investments made in the past few years. If the current business stabilizes, investors get to own a reasonably priced, cash-generative business and a 3.75% dividend.

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