How does an OEM partnership fit into our circular business model?
Premature decommissioning of equipment and liquidation of (strategic) spare stock will always be inherent to the digital world we live in and therefore, our vision of optimizing reuse of preowned equipment remains the same.
Nevertheless, periodic innovation in relation to successful IT governance is indispensable for our customers too, so why not combine the best of both worlds for our customers in one solid solution?
Why Arista?
From a perspective of lifecycle management, the areas to support with preowned equipment and Third Party Maintenance (TPM) are often very similar.
So we did a little survey on the other areas to identify what is most decisive for end users in their search for an OEM of brand new equipment, which resulted in a top 3 evaluation criteria of:
- Manageability (OS)
- Security
- Reliability
The first differentiator of Arista that caught our attention is their strategy to work with just one operating system (EOS) for all product lines, so the first box was checked.
In terms of security, we looked into the CVE statistics (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security) and learned that Arista by far has the best score: second box checked.
Lastly we had to value the reliability of different OEM’s, which could be considered rather subjective, so we looked into the Net Promotor Score (NPS, an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others). Scores above 70 are considered to be World Class support and Arista achieves an impressive +76, so our last box was checked too and by the beginning of 2021 we registered to become Arista partner.
In a further stage, we also learned that Arista…
…is world leading in 100/200/400Gbps networking products and market share
…has a CLI industry standard (10 min learning curve for let’s say Cisco CLI experts)
…has a direct support line for all technical issues, small or big
How will our customers benefit from our new, combined business model?
We notice that many end users do not have full control of the disposal of legacy equipment, because it’s often locked into the commercials of the OEM as a trade-in. Although this might look interesting at first, the trade-in value mostly does not represent actual resale market value and additionally, the returned equipment is not actively promoted anymore for reuse. Another consequence is that decision makers, in their search for new technologies, are financially incentivized to favor the currently used OEM, even when others might be a better fit for their (new) needs.
Based on our proven expertise of remarketing preowned equipment, we are confident to generate significant rest value for all assets. If our customer is convinced of the technical added value of Arista, but feels restricted to go for it because of significant investment value being stuck in other OEM’s equipment in their current infrastructure, we will adopt maximum rest value generation into our offer and help to reduce CAPEX.
Want to know more?
Get in touch with our certified sales- and technical Arista Advocates here: https://www.be-networks.be/partner/arista/
Author:
Thomas Helsen
Sales & Marketing Director
