Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) reported declining revenues in its Hybrid IT and Intelligent Edge business units, which pushed overall second quarter 2019 revenue down 4% year over year to $7.2 billion.

Intelligent Edge, which includes HPE’s Aruba networking and security products, dropped 6% compared to a year ago, to $666 million. Aruba product revenue fell 8%, while Aruba services were up 16%.

Hybrid IT, meanwhile, which includes compute, high performance compute, composable and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), storage, Pointnext IT services, and GreenLake consumption-based infrastructure and services, fell 4% year over year to $5.6 billion, primarily because of declines overall in compute revenue (down 4%) and Pointnext revenue (down 3%).

But several products and services under the Hybrid IT umbrella saw significant growth, specifically high performance compute (up 25%), HPE’s Synergy composable infrastructure product (up 78%), HCI (up 25%), and Nimble Storage (up 45%). GreenLake orders, which grew 39% year over year, experienced its “largest quarter ever,” CEO Antonio Neri said on a call with investors.

Neri said he expects HPE’s high performance compute revenue — and market share — to continue growing, boosted by the company’s $1.3 billion acquisition of supercomputing company Cray, announced earlier this month.

And he blamed trade tensions, longer than expected sales cycles with some customers, and “execution issues,” — specifically with Aruba product sales — for HPE’s revenue decline. Aruba, which HPE acquired in 2015, has been a consistent money maker for HPE in recent years and plays a pivotal role in the company’s edge strategy. Neri, at last summer’s HPE Discover conference, pledged to invest $4 billion in HPE’s edge products and services by 2022.

But despite the decline, Neri and HPE CFO Tarek Robbiati both said they expect to see an uptick in Aruba product sales in the near future. “Despite these challenges, we feel very good about our Intelligent Edge strategy and are launching our next generation of WiFi 6 products that are just beginning to sell into the installed base and will ramp more significantly in the upcoming quarters,” Robiati said on the earnings call.

“I was a bit surprised by the Aruba decline but am glad the company gave such a detailed explanation on what’s happening, and I expect a surge in the business next quarter as it sorts out its [North America] execution issues,” said Patrick Moorhead, present and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an email to SDxCentral. “Overall, I am glad to see HPE is doing well in its targeted, higher value areas, and where it is not growing the company understands the issue and what it will do about it.”

So what did happen with Aruba? Neri said the market dynamic changed in North America and the company had to quickly make some changes “on how we cover those markets where the growth is understanding that now, there is a transition on new technology with WiFi 6 and other software capabilities that we just introduced to the market.”

Additionally, some customer deals took longer than expected and won’t close until the third quarter. “And so that comes all together in a way that drove that decline in North America,” Neri said. “But I'm really confident. We know exactly what it is and we have taken active action to address it.”