As your company makes plans for the disposition of its IT assets, rarely is the decision driven entirely by their resale value. However, to better set expectations and calculate disposition costs, it helps to have an understanding of what your equipment is worth.

The value of IT equipment generally decreases steadily over time, as manufacturers bring improvements to the market. After about three or four years, disposition costs—logistics, sorting, auditing, and secure data destruction—can cancel out any value gained from remarketing. If your company plan is to refresh equipment every 36 months or so, then your equipment will probably have some resale value. But if your company is on a five-year cycle, most likely the resale value will be minimal.

Market forces at work

There are certain market forces that can act in unexpected ways to cause your equipment to lose its remarketing value sooner than expected. For example, the availability of servers that use the latest virtualization technology has resulted lately in some firms upgrading earlier than they have in the past. This has led to more used servers on the market, and thus the older ones with lower processing speeds are losing their value rapidly—or have already lost it.

Many organizations now are taking advantage of cloud storage and moving to tablets to fill a role previously served by laptop and notebook computers. This mass migration has affected the market for used laptops and notebooks, lowering their resale value.

Companies have started to upgrade to solid state (SSD) storage arrays in their data centers: yet another force that is accelerating the devaluation of existing technology. The old drives work perfectly well, but since so many companies are upgrading to the much higher capacity drives, there is not much of a market for the older drives.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the same factors that impact the value of a piece of IT equipment also impact the value of that equipment’s components.

A remarketing partner can help

There is a way to lessen the blow of these unexpected market forces. A remarketing solution provider with a wide range of sales channels has the best chance of maximizing the value you can get for the resale of your assets in the toughest market.

A knowledgeable remarketer can help you plan for your disposition costs and better set your expectations as to the potential value of your equipment, making those unexpected market forces a little less unexpected.