All Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) employees and board members will take a pay cut following the company’s dismal second-quarter 2020 earnings that were hit hard by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

HPE this afternoon reported Q2 revenues of $6 billion, down 15% from a year ago, with a drop in revenues across all of its sectors. This includes:

• Intelligent edge revenue, which dropped 2% year over year to $665 million.
• Compute revenue, at $2.6 billion, was down 19% from a year ago.
• High-performance compute (HPC) and mission-critical systems revenue of $589 million fell 18% compared to last year.
• Storage revenue was down 16% year over year, at $1.1 billion.
• Advisory and professional services revenue was $237 million, down 8% year over year.
• And financial services revenue fell 5% from last year to $833 million.

“This was a tough quarter by every measure, and I am of course disappointed in the results, but I do not view our Q2 performance as a reflection of our capabilities, nor of the opportunity ahead of us,” HPE CEO Antonio Neri said on a call with investors.

Neri said that beginning July 1, HPE will implement salary cuts for all employees through Oct. 31, 2020, with the executive team taking the biggest hit. Neri and EVPs will see their base salaries cut 25%. Senior VPs’ base salaries will be cut by 20%, and board members will also take a 25% cut to their annual cash retainer.

Employees that live in countries that prohibit pay reductions will instead take unpaid leave. “In addition, we have implemented cost containment measures across the company, and restricted external hiring through the end of our fiscal year, and put salary increases on hold,” Neri said.

Overall, HPE expects the cuts to save at least $1 billion by the end of fiscal 2022.

Neri pointed to a couple of bright points during the quarter. HPE exited Q2 with more than $1.5 billion in backlogged compute, storage, HPC, and Aruba networking orders, which Neri said represents two-times the average historical quarterly backlog despite the challenging economic backdrop.

Additionally, HPE GreenLake, its as-a-service portfolio, saw 17% annual revenue run-rate growth to $520 million, and its Intelligent Edge business unit grew 12% in North America.

“As the world emerges from the global pandemic, business continuity will depend on solutions that advance IT resiliency and power remote workforces securely, extend connectivity, reinvigorate customer engagement, and enable business model evolution,” Neri said. “This is why we must accelerate our strategy to deliver everything as a service [from] edge [to] the cloud.”

In fact, as part of the company’s cost-cutting plan it will also accelerate its pivot to as a service, Neri said, although he did not provide a timeframe for the move. In the past, Neri has said GreenLake is HPE’s fastest-growing business, and at the company’s annual conference last June he pledged to offer HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022.

Earlier this month the vendor announced the general availability of GreenLake Central, which provides visibility and consistent management across customers’ hybrid IT environments. In an earlier interview, Keith White, who leads HPE’s GreenLake business, said the new management platform plays an increasingly important role to HPE customers struggling with the COVID-19 related economic fallout.

“GreenLight Central is also giving customers the ability to do full cost analytics,” White said. “It looks at their capacity, it looks at what they’re using both on premises, in their HPE environment, but also out into the public cloud in Azure and [Amazon Web Services], and it does a full cost analytics analysis for the customer to show them what they’re spending where, but also where they can save dollars. It gives them the opportunity to move to lower-cost scenarios, so that cost analytics is key.”