Companies could put their own gear up for auction, but many prefer to sell on consignment through remarketing firms such as TechSmart in Edgewood, New York. Over the past three years, the company has completed 22,000 transactions on eBay, successfully reselling gear from General Electric, GMAC, and a range of other companies, including leasing firms and retailers. TechSmart also works directly with corporate clients on all facets of asset disposition. These days, says Mike Browne, senior vice president of asset-management sales and service, "CFOs are more involved because asset management has become a major focus and asset disposition falls under that." He says clients typically overestimate the value of their equipment. "Lower prices on new gear, 0 percent financing deals, and other factors have cut used prices by 50 to 60 percent over the past two years."

TechSmart often works on a revenue-sharing basis, remitting 60 to 75 percent of the sale price to clients. It's a mode of disposal in which timing can be everything. When a major drugstore chain tried to unload hundreds of printers just as a government agency was doing the same, the sell-off stretched from an anticipated 80 days to 200, and prices dropped 40 percent.

Whether a company takes this route or not, consultants say that senior execs should develop a "sunset" plan for getting rid of IT gear lest ROI analyses be undermined by overestimated used-computer values or underestimated liabilities and risks.

Clean Sweeps
One facet of asset disposition that shouldn't be overlooked is the need to erase data from machines that might — and in fact do — find their way into other people's hands. Redemtech, a company that specializes in data erasure, processes almost 60,000 pieces of equipment a month, primarily for banks, insurers, health-care firms, and other companies that face ever-stricter data-protection regulations.

Erasure takes many forms. On the low end, clients can opt for a perfunctory destruction of the file-allocation tables (a somewhat suspect process that's "good for almost nobody," according to Redemtech's Jill Vaske), up to a process in which Redemtech will overwrite them seven times with randomly generated ones and zeroes, which should foil any sort of forensic recovery.

By way of comparison, four overwrites is the military standard, but some companies go further. IBM actually offers an option of 100 overwrites, which, a spokesman concedes, nobody takes. There are other techniques as well. "If you really have sensitive data, the best option is total destruction," says Frances O'Brien, research director at Gartner. "That means shred, pulverize, incinerate, or melt the drive." Some customers overwrite the drives and then pulverize them. — N.A.

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