Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) reported sales of $6.7 billion for its 2nd quarter, ended April 30, 2021, up 11% from the prior-year period or 9% when adjusted for currency, with better than normal sequential seasonality driven by strong demand. GAAP gross margins was 34.1%. Non-GAAP diluted net EPS was $0.46, compared to $0.27 in the prior-year period and above the previously provided outlook of $0.38 to $0.44 per share.
“Our disciplined execution on our strategic priorities is positively impacting both top and bottom line performance,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “We are strengthening our core compute and storage businesses, doubling down in our growth Intelligent Edge and HPC businesses and accelerating our pivot to as-a-service, while also advancing our cloud-first innovation agenda to become the edge-to-cloud platform as-a-service choice for our customers and partners.”
“As businesses emerge from the pandemic and move beyond the immediate needs of COVID, digital transformation is at the forefront of their strategic initiatives,” said Neri. “Our focus has been to accelerate our strategy in order to help our customers transform their businesses, optimize their applications and data across an increasingly distributed world, and be future ready, today.”
Some highlights:
- Intelligent Edge revenue was $799 million, up 20% from the prior-year period or 17% when adjusted for currency, with 15.5% operating profit margin, compared to 12.3% from the prior-year period. Switching was up 17% from the prior-year period when adjusted for currency, WLAN was up 16% from the prior-year period when adjusted for currency, and Aruba SaaS offering was up triple-digits from the prior-year period and is now a meaningful contributor to HPE’s overall ARR.
- High Performance Compute & Mission Critical Systems (HPC & MCS) revenue was $685 million, up 13% from the prior-year period or 11% when adjusted for currency, with 2.8% operating profit margin, compared to 7.6% from the prior-year period. We remain on track to achieve our full year and 3-year revenue growth CAGR target of 8% to 12%.
- Compute revenue was $3.0 billion, up 12% from the prior-year period or up 10% when adjusted for currency, with 11.3% operating profit margin, compared to 5.8% from the prior-year period.
- Storage revenue was $1.1 billion, up 5% from the prior-year period or up 3% when adjusted for currency, with 16.8% operating profit margin, compared to 15.7% from the prior-year period. Notable strength in software-defined solutions, including Nimble, up 17% from the prior-year period when adjusted for currency with strong momentum in dHCI growing triple-digits. All flash Arrays grew 20% from the prior-year period led by Primera, up triple-digits from the prior-year period.
- Financial Services revenue was $839 million, up 1% from the prior-year period or down 3% when adjusted for currency, with 10.8% operating profit margin, compared to 9.2% from the prior-year period.