Managing your IT estate – from procurement to disposal – can be one of the biggest drains on your budget.
Technology has worked its way into the most important processes in your company, influencing everything from your staff’s productivity to the smooth running of business operations.
As such an integral part of your organisation, you cannot afford to skimp on your IT provision, but managing and funding regular refreshes requires significant investment of time and money.
Which IT problems are hampering your company?
We are an IT services company that offers customers a completely new way to acquire and manage IT equipment.
We define our IT lifecycle management services in three simple steps. Some of our clients use all of our services; others need help in just one or two steps.
Step 1. Funding IT acquisition
Many of our customers prefer to fund the acquisition of new IT through manageable regular payments rather than using cash to fund a capital purchase. Monthly fees don’t eat into your working capital, which can instead be used for investment in other areas of the business.
Here’s how we help:
- We provide lease finance to fund IT purchases. We promote leasing as we believe leasing, when provided properly, drives the ability to manage a regular refresh policy. This is because the end of the lease acts as the decision point to decide whether to refresh your IT or not.
- Once the residual value of equipment returned at the end of the lease is taken into consideration, leasing can work out cheaper than a cash purchase.
- Unlikely many lease finance providers, we’re completely transparent about our charges. We call our approach ‘ethical leasing’.
- We take care of all of the admin for you. We manage all the supplier invoices, consolidating them on to a single quarterly lease start date.
- You can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your staff are able to access up to date IT, which will minimise future maintenance costs. You’ll also be able to accurately budget for future upgrades as you replace aging equipment or grow your headcount.
Step 2. Help manage your assets
Many companies struggle to keep track of their hardware and software resources. New hardware is bought as and when it’s needed – sometimes without going through the IT department; old equipment isn’t ‘retired’ unless it breaks. Without a comprehensive and up to date asset register it becomes impossible to know when equipment should be upgraded to maintain optimum performance and minimise maintenance costs. Keeping track of software licenses can be even more difficult than hardware. Many businesses don’t know when licenses are due for renewal and may be paying unnecessarily for licenses that no one uses.
We will manage the end-to-end lifecycle of your IT, helping to:
- Management of supplier invoices
- Create an asset register for both hardware and software, ensuring you know exactly what you’ve got, and when it needs to be refreshed. You’ll have access to our online ‘auto discovery’ asset management tool, enabling you to generate reports in minutes.
- Automatically update and dynamically track the asset register with new hardware and software purchases
- Plan regular refreshes of your IT estate, ensuring that we optimise the lifecycle for performance and cost
Step 3. Disposal and replacement
Disposing of old, unused IT equipment is a significant problem for a growing number of companies. You need to have processes in place to ensure that data is completely wiped (simply reformatting the disk is not enough!), and of course comply with environmental regulations. Many third parties that offer these services want to charge for them.
We will:
- Value your old IT assets and remove them from your site, usually free of charge
- If there is residual value in the equipment, we’ll pay you
- Securely wipe the data from all of your storage devices
- Provide you with an erasure report and certificate for each asset for peace of mind
- Refurbish and whenever possible offer your old equipment for re-sale – often to schools and colleges. This is in keeping with our commitment to the principles of the circular economy.
- If there is no useable life left in the hardware we will dispose of it according to the WEEE Directive
- Discuss end-of-lease options to replace old equipment with the latest kit.
