Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) reported fiscal 2018 third quarter revenue of $7.76 billion, up 3.5 percent year over year, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.44. Revenue topped analysts’ consensus of $7.68 billion, and earnings per share topped a $0.37 consensus.

The company’s CEO Antonio Neri also announced that CFO Tim Stonesifer will be stepping down. And Neri has selected Tarek Robbiati to fill the CFO role effective Sept. 17. Robbiati, who will report to Neri, most recently served as CFO at Sprint.

In HPE’s earnings call with investors Neri said the company’s focus on shifting to higher-value growth areas was working. And he several times touted execution of HPE Next, the company’s initiative to re-architect itself from the ground up. Internally, HPE Next is known as a layoff program.

HPE's server revenue, which accounts for over 40 percent of its total revenue, rose 5 percent year over year. Storage revenue rose 1 percent over that same period.

“Our hyperconverged segment, which now includes appliances, infrastructure, and our composable offerings, grew over 130 percent year over year and has reached an annual run rate of more than $1 billion,” said Neri. "HPE Synergy delivered record revenue and has more than 1,600 customers."

At HPE’s user conference this summer, company executives said composable infrastructure was the future of on-premises data center technology and was a key competitive differentiator for the company. “Composable gives you an environment to reshape the infrastructure to match the needs of the workloads you are running on it,” said Gary Thome, vice president and chief technologist for HPE’s software defined and cloud group, in an interview with SDxCentral.

On yesterday’s investor call, Neri cited two components of its composable infrastructure. “The HPE SimpliVity platform continues to grow very, very, nicely driven by the efficiency of the software-defined storage that’s built into it with the industry leading HPE ProLiant server,” he said. And he touted HPE OneView, which is its software-defined data center infrastructure management tool.

HPE's Intelligent Edge revenue from its Aruba Networks business rose 10 percent year over year. The company recently announced that it plans to invest $4 billion in this business over the next four years.

“There is a major transition happening right now, driven by the explosion of the data created at the edge,” said Neri on yesterday’s call. “We already have a competitive advantage at the edge with Aruba.”