(Bloomberg) -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. boosted its annual profit outlook, confident that businesses are upgrading technology despite concerns about the economy.

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Earnings, excluding some items, will be $2.11 and $2.15 a share for the fiscal year ending in October, the Houston-based company said Tuesday in a statement. It previously forecast $2.06 to $2.14 a share. HPE also affirmed its previous full-year cash flow guidance of about $2 billion.

HPE affirmed its annual sales guidance earlier this month when the company announced that Chief Financial Officer Tarek Robbiati would depart to lead RingCentral Inc. Investors have shifted their focus and want to see whether HPE’s Compute and Storage units — old-line hardware businesses — can stem their recent declines, wrote Bloomberg Intelligence’s Woo Jin Ho ahead of earnings.

Fiscal third-quarter revenue gained about 1% to $7 billion, in line with analysts’ estimates. Sales in the Compute unit, which includes data centers and servers, declined 13% to $2.6 billion, slightly worse than analysts’ estimated. Storage sales dropped 5% to $1.1 billion in the period ended July 31, just better than expected.

The company is less reliant on the compute and server units due to growth in high-margin businesses, Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri said in an interview.

Sales in company’s fastest-growing business unit, Intelligent Edge, jumped 50% to $1.4 billion. The division, which is a key part of HPE’s transformation plan away from traditional hardware, covers products that let companies gather and process data where it is generated instead of sending it to an external storage center.