With a Banner 2011 behind it, Network Hardware Resale Charges forward in 2012

When it comes to the battle of whether to purchase new or pre-owned IT equipment, it’s quite similar to the stress that arises when trying to choose between the Ford and the Chevy on the pavement.

“People want Ford trucks because they last longer than Chevys; that’s why you see five times as many Fords on the road,” Mike Lodato, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Network Hardware Resale (News - Alert) – a provider of new and pre-owned networking equipment – told TMCnet. “Similarly, there are five times more pieces of Cisco equipment on the market; they build an awesome product that lasts forever. So just because the equipment might be pre-owned doesn’t mean it won’t work great.”

So in steps Network Hardware Resale, a company that sets out to put more pre-owned equipment pieces into the market since those pieces they can stand on their own amongst new pieces and for a fraction of the price.

Network Hardware Resale is the world’s largest provider of used Cisco (News - Alert) equipment, with more than 10,000 organizations in the world relying on the company. The company prides itself on reselling network equipment, and 80 percent of that is Cisco. Network Hardware Resale acquires used equipment in three ways: buying Cisco equipment off of failing companies, acquiring equipment from companies that have a surplus, and gaining equipment when others upgrade their equipment. And if you thought people weren’t so keen on pre-owned, think again.

In fact, 2011 was the company’s best year ever, thanks in large part to the fact that companies are adjusting their IT strategies and realizing what buying pre-owned really means.

“We think this whole thing is getting legitimized right now,” Lodato said. “We spent 25 years legitimizing the pre-owned equipment market and building trust in it and now we are evolving into big transactions with serious companies and people who are betting their entire revenue stream on this stuff and that’s a sign.”

“There’s a lot of boutiques are out there selling stuff out of the garage or across eBay (News - Alert),” Lodato said. “That’s not us. We are a world class global organization. We have been in business for 25 years, and two of the most well known cloud services companies on this planet use us. They are betting their business on the quality of our product and we are piggybacking on the fact that Cisco builds a great product.”

Many companies are betting their business on the quality of Network Hardware Resale’s products, including Sansum Clinic, the oldest and largest nonprofit outpatient healthcare provider in California, which turned to Network Hardware Resale to support its network infrastructure.

Forced to implement a new electronic health record (EHR) platform by 2012, Sansum choose Network Hardware Resale over other companies – including to Cisco – to help the clinic implement a new EHR platform from EPIC called "Wave,” which creates a single and continuously updated electronic chart for each patient. The highly secure platform enables healthcare providers to keep records complete and accessible from anywhere at any time. The resulting network strategy included migrating Sansum Clinic's older legacy network gear to Cisco, building a best-of-breed platform that could serve as the underlying technology to support the new EHR system.

“The first issue they had to get through was quality,” Lodato said. “We had to make sure that the hospital never goes down. When they were working with Cisco, they didn’t have enough budget to build redundancy into the network and with us they did so that allowed them to not only verify that our testing processes our true but to also validate that we have a TL 9000 certified failure rate that’s six times lower than the OEM average for new equipment.”

“They are getting a safer, better, network at a lower cost,” he added.

Network Hardware Resale’s partnership with Sansum demonstrates the company’s recent shift from purely transactional sales to strategic sales. Companies are no longer calling on Network Hardware Resale solely for emergency equipment purchases but are now choosing to invest their budgets in the pre-owned equipment.

Most importantly, its latest news demonstrates that while everyone has always known that used equipment is unbelievably cheap, Network Hardware Resale can now show you how it removes all the risk perceptions companies experience.

“This is a great idea and big major corporations are using it and you should to,” Lodato said. “We are not your father’s used equipment broker. We are a serious technology company that has the world’s best testing platform out there. We are obsessed with quality and we are doing all of this to give people safe access to these savings.”