Whitman has been in charge since the disastrous rule of Léo Apotheker who wanted to turn the outfit into a software company.

Whitman solved HP’s problems by dividing the company into four and mostly managed to turn the outfit around.

She aggressively shed assets as efficiently as a white cat on a black pair of trousers and cut tens of thousands of jobs as HPE sharpened its focus on server and networking businesses.

Taking over from Whitman in February will be Antonio Neri, a relatively unknown HP executive who has been with the company for nearly a quarter century and currently serves as HPE’s president. Neri is a trained computer engineer and has worked in every one of HPE’s businesses, Whitman said.

“We have a much smaller, much nimbler, much more focused company… I think it is the right time for Antonio and a new generation of leaders to take the reins”, she said.

Neri will join HPE’s board of directors, and Whitman will remain on the board.

Whitman’s retooling of HPE included September’s spin-off of HPE’s enterprise services and software business to British software company MicroFocus and acquired companies, including Aruba and Nimble  Storage. This month, HPE announced it is selling its Palo Alto, California, headquarters, which the company has held for six decades.

Shares of HPE have risen nearly 47 percent since the split up, outpacing the 27.8 percent rise in the S&P 500 index during the same period.

Whitman ran unsuccessfully for California governor in 2010, and she has served on the presidential campaigns of Republican former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. She endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election.

She stepped down from the board of HP in July and joined the board of Dropbox in September. Whitman said on Tuesday’s earnings call that she is “going to take a little downtime, but there’s no chance I’m going to a competitor”.

She told Reuters that she is not preparing another run for public office.

”I stay active in politics by contributing to candidates from both sides of the aisle who I agree with on core issues, but aside from that, I have no plans to get involved directly”, Whitman said in a statement.