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.)
I've known this for the last 20 years
By MindPrison
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2014-Mar-28 18:07
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
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"
By nbvb
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2014-Mar-28 18:21
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
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
By dfsmith
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2014-Mar-28 18:47
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
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.
Re:Slashvertisement?
By Roblimo
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2014-Mar-28 18:56
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
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."
So many blade servers
By ArchieBunker
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2014-Mar-28 19:32
• Score: 3
• Thread
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.