Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to see “robust” and “enduring” customer demand, while rival Dell Technologies executives cautioned a more challenging demand environment for the second half of this year. Yet both vendors touted the strong growth of their as-a-service platforms. 

“We continue to see robust customer demand in the market and a high-quality, durable sales pipeline,” said HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri during the earnings call for its third fiscal quarter of 2022. 

HPE reported a 4% revenue growth year-over-year to $7 billion this quarter, despite the supply restraint and unfavorable foreign exchange, Neri noted. But, the vendor’s new order growth rates started to decelerate in the quarter, even exceeding its expectations, he said.

The company’s year-over-year order growth rates went down 9%, as the number was up 29% year-over-year in the third quarter of the fiscal year 2021, according to HPE CFO Tarek Robbiati.

However, its as-a-service solution momentum continued in the quarter, as annualized revenue run rate of the HPE GreenLake platform up 28% and orders increased 39% year-over-year, Neri said. “These indicators show enduring demand for our as-a-service solutions, even while supply constraints limited some installations.”

Compared to HPE’s optimistic demand outlook, Dell saw a slowed demand growth of its Infrastructure Solution Group (ISG) in its second fiscal quarter of 2022 and expects that moderating demand continues for the rest of the year. 

“We did see ISG demand moderate across the quarter in terms of the overall demand growth,” Dell CFO Tom Sweet said during the earnings call last week. 

The company saw slowed demand growth in both servers and storage “but at a moderating rate as just more caution entered the environment,” Dell Co-Chief Operating Officer Chuck Whitten said. 

“Since we have the largest direct selling organization of all of the technology companies, we feel like we have a pretty good pulse on current demand and environment,” Whitten added. “And we’re just seeing more cautiousness on behalf of the customers, as they’re sorting through spend, as they’re thinking through projects, we are seeing projects come to fruition. They’re taking longer to close, and the size of the projects are somewhat reduced from what we’ve seen in the past.”

Similar to HPE, the growth of Dell’s as-a-service platform stands out as well. Whitten called out the momentum on the Apex platform during the call. “Our APEX ARR is now over $1 billion and we grew orders 78% year-on-year in Q2, while adding almost 200 new customers.”