Our role in the channel is to ensure that we position and promote the benefits of OEM certified remanufactured products and make it ever easier for our partners and resellers to bring them to more end customers. Our Circular Technology Solutions benefit the triple bottom line, while also reducing IT’s waste and carbon footprint. We think it’s good for partners, good for end customers, good for the planet.
What is the Circular Economy?
The Circular Economy works as an alternative to the traditional linear method of ‘take, make, dispose’, in order to develop more sustainable methods of ‘make, use, recertify, re-use’. In a circular model, once a product’s ‘in service’ lifecycle comes to an end, it is repurposed for a second life, removing the need for the creation of a brand-new product – benefiting the environment in the process. Westcon-Comstor’s Circular Technology Solutions (CTS) look to enable the circular economy for networking and IT infrastructure.
Westcon-Comstor CTS
CTS promotes the use of environmentally friendly, OEM-certified remanufactured equipment that makes great business sense. We hold Cisco-certified remanufactured Cisco stock (Cisco Refresh), with simple access to inventory, and can facilitate blended orders that combine original manufacturer refreshed products with new manufactured ones.
This allows its partners to enhance their margins whilst equally benefiting customers with a sustainable low-carbon-footprint solution, who can buy 100% certified, OEM-quality Cisco equipment at a significantly lower cost.
The CTS practice is also onboarding Juniper Certified Pre-Owned (JCPO) equipment to the portfolio in early 2020. Additional equipment vendors will be rolled out, subject to their remanufacturing capabilities and ability to support our global customer requirements.
Our green services
We’ve developed a portfolio of solutions to support CTS. These unique capabilities have been designed to remove the complexity of combining new and remanufactured IT equipment into a single, hybrid solution. This is all done without compromising the quality or technical deliverables of a project.
Green Mine
Developed specifically for global service providers, Green Mine delivers significant savings by maximising Cisco-Refresh-certified remanufactured equipment blending to support managed services or retained assets.
Our proprietary CTS blending engine builds a custom profile based on a customer’s purchase history and predicted forecasts. Leveraging this insight, it identifies opportunities to pre-order and ring-fence inventory to deliver a seamless ordering experience of new and remanufactured products for rapid deployment. With a typical refresh blend of 20-40%, savings of up to 15% can be achieved on total order value.
Green Advantage
Green Advantage seeks to increase customer value and maintain higher margins in competitive bids. When price really matters, we deliver blended solutions that maximise Cisco-Refresh-certified remanufactured equipment alongside new products for the most competitive solution.
Our CTS teams stock and pre-order Cisco Refresh equipment to ensure maximum inventory availability in line with partner needs and customer timescales.
Green Spares
We proactively source Cisco-Refresh-certified remanufactured equipment matched to partners’ agreed sparing profile. Whilst delivering significant savings by maximising current and end-of-sale equipment availability, this also provides a trusted alternative which avoids the risk of sourcing unlicensed equipment from unauthorised brokers.
Goodbye to grey
In order to be sold as ‘remanufactured’, a product must meet stringent original manufacturer quality criteria, which can only be completed by the OEM. This process of meeting specific requirements results in an incredibly reliable product with a ‘like new’ feel.
With remanufactured devices, end-users purchase like-new products with the new and out-of-the-box experience – original packaging, same warranty and support as equivalent new product, updated shippable revision software – for a saving of up to 40%. As a result, any grey products (those of indeterminate origin) on the market are redundant.
Who benefits from this?
Often products sourced outside of the authorised channel can be counterfeit, may require expensive software updates, or be non-compliant with existing installed base. Using Westcon-Comstor CTS ensures the customer, partner and original manufacturer see the full circular benefits, by removing risk from a hybrid new-and-used-equipment environment.
What is the future for CTS?
The future roadmap for CTS is very exciting. As more and more companies see the value of hybrid new and remanufactured solutions, our ability to scale the process becomes key to their success.
Unlike new products, remanufactured equipment has finite availability and as such leveraging full end-to-end supply chain capabilities is fundamental to ensuring a constant supply back into the manufacturer of top-quality equipment for re-use.
Looking forward, we are working with vendors to develop a suite of innovative solutions to incentivise and enable migration and product return in a fully compliant manner. Our mission is to connect the dots to enable IT circularity and be best in the world at being best for the world.
