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Used IT Equipment Can Be Worth a Fortune (Video)
This is a conversation with Frank Muscarello, CEO and co-founder of MarkiTx, a company that brokers used and rehabbed IT equipment. We're not talking about an iPhone 3 you might sell on craigslist, but enterprise-level items. Cisco. Oracle. IBM mainframes. Racks full of HP or Dell servers. That kind of thing. In 2013 IDC pegged the value of the used IT equipment market at $70 billion, so this is a substantial business. MarkiTx has three main bullet points: *Know what your gear is worth; *Sell with ease at a fair price; and *Buy reliable, refurbished gear. Pricing is the big deal, Frank says. With cars you have Cars.com and Kelley Blue Book. There are similar pricing services for commercial trucks, construction equipment, and nearly anything else a business or government agency might buy or sell used. For computers? Not so much. Worth Monkey calls itself "The blue book for used electronics and more," but it only seems to list popular consumer equipment. I tried looking up several popular Dell PowerEdge servers. No joy. An HTC Sensation phone or an Acer Aspire notebook? Sure. With price ranges based on condition, same as Kelley Blue Book does with cars. Now back to the big iron. A New York bank wants to buy new servers. Their old ones are fully depreciated in the tax sense, and their CTO can show stats saying they are going to suffer from decreasing reliability. So they send out for bids on new hardware. Meanwhile, there's a bank in Goa, India, that is building a server farm on a tight budget. If they can buy used servers from the New York bank, rehabbed and with a warranty, for one-third what they'd cost new, they are going to jump on this deal the same way a small earthmoving operation buys used dump trucks a multinational construction company no longer wants.
In February, 2013 Computerworld ran an article titled A new way to sell used IT equipment about MarkiTx. The main differentiator between MarkiTx and predecessor companies is that this is primarily an information company. It is not eBay, where plenty of commercial IT equipment changes hands, nor is it quite like UK-based Environmental Computer, which deals in used and scrap computer hardware. It is, rather, the vanguard of computer hardware as a commodity; as something you don't care about as long as it runs the software you need it to run, and you can buy it at a good price -- or more and more, Frank notes -- rent a little bit of its capacity in the form of a cloud service, a direction in which an increasing number of business are moving for their computing needs. Even more fun: Let's say you are (or would like to be) a local or regional computer service company and you want to buy or sell or broker a little used hardware. You could use MarkiTx's price information to set both your buy and sell prices, same as a car dealer uses Kelley Blue Book. We seem to be moving into a whole new era of computer sales and resales. MarkiTx is one company making a splash in this market. But there are others, and there are sure to be even more before long. (Alternate video link.)
In February, 2013 Computerworld ran an article titled A new way to sell used IT equipment about MarkiTx. The main differentiator between MarkiTx and predecessor companies is that this is primarily an information company. It is not eBay, where plenty of commercial IT equipment changes hands, nor is it quite like UK-based Environmental Computer, which deals in used and scrap computer hardware. It is, rather, the vanguard of computer hardware as a commodity; as something you don't care about as long as it runs the software you need it to run, and you can buy it at a good price -- or more and more, Frank notes -- rent a little bit of its capacity in the form of a cloud service, a direction in which an increasing number of business are moving for their computing needs. Even more fun: Let's say you are (or would like to be) a local or regional computer service company and you want to buy or sell or broker a little used hardware. You could use MarkiTx's price information to set both your buy and sell prices, same as a car dealer uses Kelley Blue Book. We seem to be moving into a whole new era of computer sales and resales. MarkiTx is one company making a splash in this market. But there are others, and there are sure to be even more before long. (Alternate video link.)
I go through them looking for goodies.
I can't tell if this reads like an ad for one of DICE's partners/customers or not...
is this an ad? you have to tell me if it is.
Worthmoney couldn't find items I searched for... It said they were not in their database although was able to show me a full name during a search. That does not make sense!
"No, but understanding is not required, only obedience."
And it has saved my butt more than a few times. Basically everything I have is second-hand, and the IT equipment is no exception. And it's worth more than most people think. I've been picking up older but very good computers here and there for peanuts, and re-sold them for thousands.
Same thing with other tech gear, radios are particularly lucrative as they're still useable, and people like to listen to radio all over the world. Of course, you can't sell any old gear...it has to have some kind of collectors value OR usability value, perhaps even both. Those items I've collected are all high-end products from their own time. Rare portables with rare interfaces fetches a small fortune. Some laptops have very good serial port functions, and runs well on older operating systems - this is excellent for programming older micro-controllers and burning special eproms that can't be programmed with modern burners.
There are specialty plotters & cutters & cnc machines that doesn't have new drivers and the businesses can't afford to purchase new CNC machines when their old ones are doing a perfectly good job. That old computer comes in and saves the day.
If you think everything can be solved with a new computer, think again - old serial port based equipment (RS232 etc.) Parallel port etc. have timing issues with newer computers that simply are too fast, and the operating system "simulating ports" is just way too incompatible in "dos mode" etc. Trust me, I've been doing this for YEARS - and no matter HOW good you are as a coder/hardware hacker...you simply can't solve all these issues just like that.
The old "If it's not broken, why fix it?" applies here.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Oh, please...
Used IT gear has been sold professionally for as long as there's been IT gear.
This is just a crappy ad for another Johnny-come-lately vendor.
Last time I went to Weird Stuff they had a huge stack of 1U, 8GB DRAM Dell servers for about $150 each.
I don't think a "Blue Book" system could ever work:
So many good blade servers show up on ebay with pretty decent specs but they are useless without the rack to supply power and most lack a way for adding video. I'm talking about 3 year old blades with dual quad core Xeons and 8Gb of memory for $50. Even if you did rig one up the cooling fans would be deafening for desktop use.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Suppose a university scientist wins a grant to buy a million dollar instrument. Thirty years later, the scientist dies. Nobody knows what the instrument is anymore, or what it is worth. University policy does not allow the sale of excess property. Nobody knows what restrictions were placed on the sale of the equipment in the grant award. Nobody wants to pay money to figure any of these things out. So, the equipment is either ignored or landfilled.
In my experience this happens often.
Simon's Rock College
"If I were building a secure network machine,"
I would got with SPARC, you can get SPARC stations for dirt and they have decent specs even today. Compile BSD for it and you will have a 100% virus and trojan proof computer.
Go with a robust and oddball platform. If you want flashy and street cred, get your hands on some old Silicon Graphics hardware.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Uh, I am pretty sure they do much of this already.
We have P4 "workstations" that are used to run highly specialised equipment, they still cost thousands to replace second-hand due to the niche nature of the exact motherboards they use, so it's possible.
You have clearly never worked for/consulted small businesses. Budget is paramount, and a used server can be the difference between a viable setup and a user's laptop running as a fileserver.
I tend to packrat hardware. It pays off in the long run. When I want something, I build it. When the clutter starts to grow I will throw parts on EBAY and see what flies. Usually I can get about $10 per part for most, some I get nothing.
I just sold late 90's HP RAID controllers for the NetServer SCO servers, new in the original box. I got $900 each for them. Somebody has an old server running a critical legacy application, when they see working spare parts for it, they snatch them up. Apparently there were more than one for this piece as the bidding was furious on both auctions.
eBay could be the perfect place to sell used electronics. The problem is the way they handle auction / buy-it-now listings.
Suppose you have a used Dell-brand server. You know that almost nobody is going to spend more than $800 on it, because for that money you could buy a new model. On the other hand, you figure someone out there might spend $500 on it because they're nearby and need it ASAP. And, you're willing to let people bid on it for a week and get it rid of it at the end of the week.
You can't accomodate all three parameters at once. If you set a reserve price, then once auctioning hits that reserve, then the buy-it-now is killed. On the other hand, if final bids are less than reserve, then the auction is effectively cancelled, and you're stuck holding the item.
Until eBay changes this, it will remain a non-ideal place to sell old IT equipment.
Compile BSD for it and you will have a 100% virus and trojan proof computer.
While it may be true there are less known exploits for oddball platforms, an oddball platform is not inherently more secure, and certainly not 100% virus / trojan proof. All you do is add a level of difficulty, which may stop script kiddies, but a determined attacker (or sophisticated attacker who might see more oddball equipment then you think (read NSA)) will still get through.
I do sell IT surplus equipment and the real issue I see here is that the fees are about double that of eBay's. The exchange getting a 20% cut is a huge deal on the lower-end items. Combine this with their limited user base, general shopping practices, and small amount of value add, it's not worth the extra pricing information.
For instance: I have a stack of Cisco 2960G Switches. I can go to eBay, do a search for closed auctions, or go to any number of pricing services to get historical selling prices. Since these are common, I will have no issue seeing the buying range. I make a compelling ad, pay $0 to list and pay 10% on the final value and probably 2.7% on the payment end. I can make a compelling ad and create incentives to get people to use me instead some other seller.
Now take something like a Thin Client, KVM cables, Rack keyboards, etc: low volume, and low price. Same fees for eBay. Double for this exchange. AND no one is looking for them because it's geared towards the network hardware side of things.
While I think it's a good idea and if they can get people to pay that much for an automated pricing system, great. But I'll be skipping it for now.
- Dan
See, I run a charity that gets those machines as donations - we have hundreds. So please, tell me so that I can get what we REALLY need.
Virtually none of the machines you're getting are that special. If they were, they'd have been sold or given to someone who cared.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sites that require signing up just to see what they have to offer are annoying as hell, and this one doesn't look useful based on any of its front-page accessible marketing literature. It looks like it wants to be "used IT eBay" but it doesn't let you see anything. I'll just stick to eBay.
I checked prices of stuff I've been trying to buy, and its way, way off. Like 10x off. C2950's used go for like $18-150 and they say it starts at the high point. Ok, sure. Maybe its all new stuff, but I cant tell, so what good is this?
I think you can get both lightly used almost anywhere. Microcenter around here has PATA drives of all sizes and AT power supplies can be had online.
P4's are pretty much at the bottom of the depreciation curve. Too out of date to be used as general use machines, too new to be retro, and common enough that they're still "just an old computer". In 20 years, the P4's that manage to survive may appreciate in value, kind of like how a 486 in good working order can fetch decent money whereas in the late 90's they were worthless. But then again, maybe not.
You have clearly never worked for/consulted small businesses. Budget is paramount, and a used server can be the difference between a viable setup and a user's laptop running as a fileserver.
In fairness, if that's what you are choosing between, a Synology single drive box is only $150, $200 for one with raid, and $300 for "the good one". If they don't have even that sort of budget, it's because 1) they're not a business, 2) they wasted money on consultant labor, or 3) they're not in the US.
If it's just one person, a usb drive for backups of their laptop is better than a server.