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.)

Comments

Slashvertisement?

[glasshole]

I can't tell if this reads like an ad for one of DICE's partners/customers or not...

Re:Slashvertisement?

[Sarten-X]

The problem is that it looks like an ad.

It seems to be a common trait of video-related articles, likely due to the way the videos are produced. Rather than general discussion of a new technology's impact or contribution to the state of the art, the videos often focus on one brand's selling points. To those familiar with the brand, the article is just a review of what they already know. To those outside the brand's narrow field, the benefits of the industry are obscured by the focus on the single brand.

This inconvenient focus often transfers to the summary as well. In this example, the brand MarkiTx is mentioned six times. In comparison, James Schlesinger's obituary includes his name only three times. Many stories include the subject's name only once in the summary. This disparity becomes very obvious when the reader skims the summary, and their eyes are drawn to the capitalized names.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution to recommend. The typical news outlet avoids the issue by making their segments a compilation of several interviews and depictions, but that requires a rather large investment of labor and a specialized workflow, which I don't believe Slashdot's set up for. As for the writing, it is natural that the articles read more like a press release than an article. I assume that you've spent longer writing this piece than you would spend proofreading a user-submitted summary, so it's now a personal effort. The quality of the writing is higher than the usual submissions, and as you're more familiar with the subject, it's longer as well.

In short, the whole thing just seems different from Slashdot's usual fare. Given the somewhat-paranoid anti-corporate disposition of the userbase, the assumption is that it's a sponsored submission.

Come on, what a ridiculous "article"

[nbvb]

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.

Dell PowerEdge

[dfsmith]

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:

• Used IT equipment comes in bursts: imagine thousands of the same model of car in the same color/options all appearing at the dealership at once. Supply is grossly disconnected from demand. Pricing could never equilibriate.
• Computing power is still growing too fast: yesterday's servers consume too much resource per unit of work/infrastructure to justify using them. Witness the secondary price above—less than 1/20th of the original purchase price, but when networking, rack space, storage and power are included, the capital cost, even if zero, would still likely be too high.