How to Determine the Best Time to Dispose of IT Equipment [Ask the Engineer]

Jack Kauter and Park Place Technologies ITAD Practice Director, Chris Menninger, discuss how technology leaders can determine the optimal time to dispose of IT equipment, and how many assets to retain.

Jack: Hi there, Jack Kauter, Park Place Technologies here and welcome back to Ask the Engineer. For this week’s question I’m joined by Chris Menninger, Director of ITAD for Professional
Services at Park Place. How we doing Chris?

Chris: I’m great Jack how are you?

How to Determine the Best Time to Dispose of IT Assets

Jack: I’m very well thank you. Chris, the question I have for you is regarding disposal of assets. Given the supply chain constraints, how do I determine the best time to dispose of my current IT assets?

Chris: That’s a great and very relevant question Jack. What we’re seeing right now is customers struggling with the pricing in the market being as good as it’s ever been versus the supply chain constraints they’re experiencing in terms of getting new equipment.

Consider IT Sparing Needs

What we’re telling people is to look at what they have. Look at your environment, determine if you do in fact have enough sparing to keep going and sell what you can, because you’re going to get a premium return on your investment.

If you don’t, then you need to hold on to that equipment because it is very, very much constrained today.

Jack: In part of your answer there Chris, you mentioned sparing. How does one determine if they have enough sparing?

How to Calculate IT Sparing Needs

Chris: What we generally recommend is to look into your environment and determine approximately 10% of what your environment looks like and hold that for spares. It’s probably a little higher on the network side simply because the network is an even more constrained area right now, given all of the manufacturing constraints that the big network manufacturers like Cisco are seeing; they’re running almost a year behind right now.

Jack: Thanks, Chris. Great response to a topical question that we so often hear. I’m sure that will help a lot of our viewers out there.

We hope you found that insightful, and as always, please feel free to submit a question to our engineers by commenting below this post and we’ll see you next time on ask the engineer.