In the early 1970s, when the government, as part of a lengthyantitrust action, forced IBMIBM to sell equipment and not just rent it,companies such as Comdisco and Forsythe-Macarthur bought IBM S360s andentered the leasing business. Thus, the secondary marketplace - whereused hardware is bought and sold - was born. It was a niche business,and it stayed that way for 25 years. Until everyone lost hismind. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

That was about five years ago. Flush with Internet cash, CIOs stockedup, buying a server for every application. With Y2K looming, theybought backups too. With the Web, there was no such thing as too muchstorage or networking capacity. Demand was massive, and supplystrained to keep up.

Then, overnight, demand vanished. Companies that had been buyinghardware in bulk - mainly telecoms and dotcoms - went out of business.Other companies decapitated their IT budgets and started consolidatingservers and data centers. Most also decided that their old serverswere good enough. Who needed the new new thing? Leases ended on astartling amount of equipment.

Put it all together, and you get a sudden and unprecedented surplus ofperfectly good routers, switches, disks, servers, PCs andnotebooks.

There is so much used hardware available now - and so much emphasis oncutting costs - that the secondary market is no longer a nichebusiness. Nor does it appear to be a transient, post-boom phenomenon.Experts point to four factors to support this assertion: 1. chipsdon't wear out like automobile engines, meaning this gear will bemarketable for years to come; 2. the sheer volume of hardware createdduring the late '90s can support the secondary market for years(consider that a startup, MicroCast, earned $880,000 in revenuebetween 1999 and 2000, filed Chapter 11 in late 2000 and left behindhardware valued at $40 million); 3. once buyers get used to wholesaleprices, it's unlikely they'll willingly go back to buying retail; 4.the services developing to support the secondary market are making iteasier and less frightening for buyers to participate. Soon CIOs won'tbe able to imagine not having the option to buy used.