How Horizon helped one cloud storage provider unearth ongoing value in its retiring hard drives.
You might be surprised how much value is stored in the spinning disks in your data center. Just ask one long-time Horizon customer who returns upward of $1 million in annualized revenue from IT hardware it no longer needs.
At the start of its relationship with Horizon, the client, a leading cloud storage provider, was not yet large enough to benefit through bulk buying directly with the OEMs. Horizon helped obtain savings on enterprise hard drives that it wouldn’t otherwise have accessed
This helped build trust, which opened the doors for a wider conversation about the storage industry. Horizon explained how the secondary marketplace for used and excess data center hardware worked, as well as the financial and operational benefits of IT asset recovery.
Initially surprised that its retiring drives held value and were not simply good for recycling, the client was open to testing the waters.
The project started small and built up gradually over time, remarketing larger and larger quantities of data center hardware. Drives would be securely data sanitized, rigorously tested, and then remarketed at prices advantageous to the client.
“They definitely had questions at the beginning around how we would handle the drives, including the drives that were not working,” remarks Jayme Moffi, senior global account manager at Horizon.
The specificity and rigor of Horizon’s workflow, including the creation of client-specific SOPs, quickly allayed concerns.
Storage Expertise
Of course, recouping value from an asset that was previously viewed as little more than a disposition headache is good for the corporate IT budget.
However, Moffi ultimately credits the longevity of the client relationship to factors elsewhere. He cites the advice Horizon offers on asset recovery best practices and the commercial insights it shares into the global hardware market.
“There are a lot of different markets that we touch, which was of value to them—as it is to many of our customers—because we bring a unique perspective and have our hand in a lot of different marketplaces globally.”
“One of our strengths is that we can offer maximum value for storage hardware because we have such a global presence in selling those used drives. We have a lot of different outlets and a lot of buyers who are able to pay top dollar, so we are able to offer our customers top dollar in turn.”
The Horizon Difference
In the early days when the client’s working capital remained tight, Horizon was able to offer generous lines of credit through its innovative Trade In, Trade Up program, which allows companies to return recovered funds to their IT budgets or alternatively hold the funds as a credit toward the purchase of new inventory.
“They appreciated our flexibility in many ways, whether scheduling drives, extending terms, or any number of programs we were able to offer them,” he remarks.
Above all, Moffi cites the building of trust as the key factor underpinning the relationship. “They consistently talk to me about how we make life easy for them. They trust us and come to us for a lot of outside market data.”
Learn more about how Horizon can help recover value from your retiring or end-of-life data center hardware.
