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

I pick up all the hard drives I can.

[Anonymous Coward]

I go through them looking for goodies.

Re:I pick up all the hard drives I can.

[fustakrakich]

Magnets?

Slashvertisement?

[glasshole]

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

Re:Slashvertisement?

[Roblimo]

I would *never* make or run a paid ad unless is was clearly identified as "sponsored content" or "advertisement" or some such, and when you say that's what I'm doing without the notice, you're insulting me. No problem. I have thick skin.

What this company is doing that's different from others is building a worldwide database of used enterprise-level hardware prices. This is a GREAT tool if you need to buy or sell (or just [price) used/rehabbed equipment. Nothing to do with Dice -- although if it makes you happy to believe it does, go right ahead.

Meanwhile, I'm sure there are some Slashdot users who are looking at this and thinking, "Hmmm..... there's a business opportunity here for me."

Re:Slashvertisement?

[Wycliffe]

Thanks for the reply. It still reads like an ad. I also thought it was an ad until I saw this reply.
I didn't even get through the whole summary. I started skimming as soon as my "this is spam"
meter went off. I'm not sure what the solution is but it would be best to avoid making articles look
like someone paid you to post them.

On a somewhat related note, my dad cut up some old generators from a power plant and sold
them as scrap only to find out later that they could have possibly been worth $250k apiece
if sold to rural towns in india.

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.

Re:Slashvertisement?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well...why aren't you getting paid for Slashvertisements? Seems like an easy way to make cash on the side. If you're not getting paid then why do you run such free ads? You're just getting used. Seems off to me.

worthmoney couldn't find ...

[cirrustelecom]

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!

I've known this for the last 20 years

[MindPrison]

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.

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.

So many blade servers

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Re:Also a big problem in science labs.

[Rich0]

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.

Yup. At work there is still an old VAX sitting in a room because nobody wanted to deal with the disposal forms. It still had residual capitalization since the asset was tied to the value of the work required to deploy it (the hardware is the cheap part of a custom software project), and the writeoff went across many years. It couldn't be disposed of without fully depreciating it, which is a PITA. So, it just sits there.

The value of any kind of specialized hardware also depends greatly on finding the right buyer. We had a bunch of data acquisition boxes that only worked with a particular vendor's proprietary software, but newer versions of the software used different boxes and the old ones were discontinued. That made the old boxes either worthless or priceless depending on whether you could find somebody desperate for them.

Junk?

[Life2Death]

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?