Waste Management

HP encourages solution providers to work with customers on handling old equipment trade-ins, said Anderson. In such a case, the vendor sends a check for the value of the products once the customer is satisfied with audits on how the data was destroyed.

IBM, Armonk, N.Y., also offers a program under which its global financing arm will pay cash for old equipment, or will provide free pickup and disposition of 25 or more working units as part of a trade-in. Customers can also pay for IBM to provide a Department of Defense-compliant three-pass wipe of data, or a customized wipe, depending on data value, according to company executives.

Advanced Systems Group, an Irvine, Calif.-based IBM solution provider, either uses IBM to handle obsolete equipment or works with local brokers, said Kari Simmerman, contract manager at the company.

Brokers have been the traditional route Advanced Systems Group has offered its customers, said Simmerman. "But now I'm leaning to get us to work more with IBM, which guarantees that data was stripped," she said. "But brokers offer better margins. They do their best to dispose of old data, but there are stories of problems with some brokers."

For Advanced Systems Group, handling old equipment is a customer service and not an income generator. Simmerman said the company either applies what brokers pay for the old products to the customer's deals, or it may keep a little in-house to cover administration costs. "But our focus is really on selling new equipment," she said.

A couple of top distributors have recently started bringing in third-party IT asset disposal companies to work with their solution providers.

Ingram Micro in early April started Ingram Micro Outlet, an IT refurbishment and disposition offering for solution providers looking to help customers handle unwanted IT equipment, said Justin Crotty, the Santa Ana, Calif.-based distributor's vice president of channel marketing for North America.

If old IT equipment has resale value, disposal firms DealTree or Intechra will purchase the items for refurbishment and will pay the solution provider for the market value of the products via a credit against future purchases from Ingram Micro, said Crotty. The distributor also has other partners that accept products with no resale value and dispose of them in an environmentally friendly fashion, he said.

Solution providers whose customers are looking to dispose of fewer than 50 items under the Ingram Micro Outlet program are sent to Intechra, where they will find online tools that automatically determine the value of most used equipment, said Kevin Dooley, senior vice president of business development at the Carrollton, Texas-based disposal firm. Some items may require manual quotes, he said.

Once the products, which could include monitors, desktops, laptops, communications, IP equipment and storage, are received by Intechra and their condition confirmed, Intechra arranges for a credit for the value to be sent to the solution provider, which can keep it or apply it to a customer's order, Dooley said.

Intechra then wipes the data using Department of Defense-standard wiping routines. Some products are then resold through Ingram Micro Outlet, some go to Intechra's other channels, and the rest are destroyed with an eye toward environmental concerns, he said.

Solution providers whose customers have more than 50 items to sell are sent to DealTree, which operates in a similar fashion. DealTree, Lake Forest, Calif., handles a wider variety of equipment, including gaming systems, cell phones, audio equipment, LCD monitors and MP3 players, said Paul Fletcher, president and co-founder.

Once DealTree acquires the products, it uses third-party, Department of Defense-compliant software to clean the data, and then resells the products in outlets such as Ebay. "One person's junk is another person's gold," Fletcher said.

For products with no resale value, including all CRT monitors, DealTree will accept them from customers who pay the pass-through costs of sending them to Irvine-based eWaste for recycling, said Fletcher.

DealTree also offers a similar program via distributor Synnex, Fremont, Calif.

In April, Clearwater, Fla.-based Tech Data began offering an IT asset disposal program to its TechSelect solution providers using RetroBox, said Annette Taber, sales director for TechSelect. The RetroBox program is offered to TechSelect members at a 15 percent discount and may eventually be opened to non-TechSelect members, she said.

RetroBox's Corbin said his company's business has on the average doubled annually for the past eight years and is on track to do so again this year. For solution providers that require IT asset disposal, RetroBox offers Department of Defense-certified information wiping services. The company also helps solution providers and their customers by providing outlets for their old equipment, such as internal redeploys, discounted sales to employees, and external sales through the RetroBox Web site, said Corbin. Products that have no resale value are recycled.

In addition to working with TechSelect members, RetroBox just launched a partner program to offer solution providers a turnkey solution to IT asset disposal, Corbin said. "We manage the whole program, and give the resellers a check—real money they can decide what to do with. Resellers can also mark up the service," he said.

RetroBox indemnifies customers against the risk of data not being completely wiped out. "We have an environmental compliance manager whose whole role is to understand the entire downstream process," said Corbin. "That manager can indemnify our clients from disposal risks. We've never had a problem so far. But I'm going to knock on wood."

While most IT asset disposal programs use three-swipe Department of Defense-certified methods or even programs with up to 10 swipes to ensure no data escapes on used hard drives, not everyone thinks that is enough. The National Association of Information Destruction (NAID) is not convinced that any data wiping software can truly guarantee data destruction. "A computer with a wiped hard drive looks the same as a computer with an unwiped drive," said Bob Johnson, NAID executive director.

As far as the Department of Defense-certified wiping process, Johnson said that the department uses it for unclassified information, but for classified data the only solution is to physically destroy the hard drive in such a way that the maximum particle size is only five-eighths of an inch.

"We know that banks, hospitals and so on will resell computers," Johnson said. "But we feel they need to know who is wiping their data, how they are doing it. We come down on the side of caution and say that physical destruction is best."