Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) handily beat expectations and reported third-quarter 2020 revenue of $6.8 billion. This is down 6% from the prior year, but it’s a 14% increase from HPE’s dismal Q2.

Perhaps most significantly, GreenLake, which is HPE’s consumption-based IT portfolio, saw skyrocketing year-over-year growth. HPE CEO Antonio Neri previously said GreenLake is HPE’s fastest-growing business, and at the company’s annual conference last year he pledged to offer HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022.

“Our pivot to as a service continued strong momentum in the quarter,” Neri said today on the HPE Q3 earnings call. “Our annualized run revenue run rate of $528 million grew 11% year over year. GreenLake services orders grew at a record 82% year over year. We believe this is faster than the overall growth of public cloud vendors, and it is a validation of our hybrid strategy and competitive differentiation.”

GreenLake’s growth provides proof that HPE’s edge-to-cloud strategy resonates with customers, Neri added. He talked about this strategy at HPE Discover earlier this summer, and about cloud being an “experience,” not a destination. What he means by this is that customers want the same flexibility and scalability that public cloud provides in their on-premises data centers and at the edge. They also want to be able to build and migrate applications, and process and store data across a hybrid IT environment. Neri, during his opening keynote at Discover, called GreenLake “the cloud that comes to you.”

“We are focused on delivering one seamless cloud experience for all applications and data, no matter where they exist — at the edge, in a data center, in a colocation, or in a public cloud estate,” he said on today’s call. Neri also noted that HPE’s competitors “have now publicly declared plans to offer everything as a service.” While he didn’t name names, he’s talking about Dell Technologies and Cisco. Earlier this month Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced his company’s shift to consumption-based IT. “We will accelerate the transition of the majority of our portfolio to be delivered as a service,” Robbins said.

And last November, Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said his company will offer all of its new products under its on-demand portfolio as well as several existing products.

“We have been focused on this for several years and have made significant organic and inorganic investments to deliver a differentiated experience for our customers,” Neri said during the HPE Q3 call.

Neri also called out another significant inorganic investment that HPE made during the quarter. In July, HPE said it reached a $925 million deal to acquire Silver Peak and boost its SD-WAN.

“Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN offering strengthens our Aruba ESP and complements our robust existing work-from-home and branch-office solutions to deliver one of the industry’s most comprehensive portfolios designed to securely connect any edge to any cloud,” Neri said today.

During HPE’s Q2 call Neri announced company-wide pay cuts. This, combined with HPE’s as-a-service strategy and other cost-cutting measures, intended to trim at least $1 billion dollars and annualized net run-rate savings of at least $800 million dollars by fiscal 2022 year-end.

On the third-quarter call, Neri said these savings remain on track. “We remain on track to deliver the annualized net run rate savings of at least $800 million dollars by the end of fiscal year '22 driven by optimizing our workplace site strategy, simplifying our product portfolio, and introducing new digital customer engagement models,” he said.

In terms of its business segment revenue, HPE reported growth in high performance compute while the other sectors remained flat or declined year over year but saw sequential improvements.

Intelligent edge revenue was $684 million, down 12% year over year, but up 3% compared to the earlier quarter.

Compute revenue was flat compared to last year. It reached $3.4 billion, which represents a 28% increase compared to the second quarter.

High performance compute and mission critical systems revenue was $649 million, up 3% year over year and 10% sequentially.

Storage revenue dropped 10% compared to last year to $1.1 billion but grew 4% compared to Q2.

Advisory and professional services revenue was down 7% year over year to $226 million. This is a 5% drop from last quarter, and COVID-19 continued to “impact consulting activities of our team members,” the company said in a statement.

And finally, financial services revenue dropped 9% year over year and 3% sequentially to $811 million.