Networking equipment liquidation is something that a lot of companies go through and indeed it can be a very difficult process if you don't go into it intelligently. There are two types of networking equipment liquidations; the ones that take place in order for the company to upgrade its network and the ones that take place in order for the company to simply go out of business. Both of them are busy times simply because of the overall importance of networking equipment to basically every company in existence right now Therefore a few steps need to be understood before you venture into this uncertain area. These are not so much steps as they are checklist items, so the order for the most part is self-evident.


Planning & Budgeting


This should go without saying if you have any amount of experience with networking and network equipment, but at the same time it is worth mentioning time and time again just so you have it fresh in your mind. Before you do anything with any part of your business, you need to plan. The reason for this is that a plan allows you to know what to do in either general or specific terms, so time is not wasted later on down the road. Making and sticking to a plan is perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to do, but at the same time a plan that is well stuck to and executed is a very rewarding thing to have.


In the case of this specific circumstance, what you want to plan out is the networking equipment liquidation. Chances are you are going to be getting rid of some items and getting others in their place (or maybe just getting rid of everything) and therefore you need to know down to the last cable what exactly is moving where. If you don't, then you might have some nasty surprises waiting for you later on down the road when you try to take advantage of the changes that you have made.


If you are combining your networking equipment liquidation with some re-stocking, then you are going to need to have a budget that tells you where all the money is going. Every good successful network has a lot of planning behind it and budgeting is a special kind of planning that you can do once you've figured out exactly what is going where.


Execution


The execution of the actual liquidation is not really a big deal, simply because in the planning and budgeting phases of your plan of attack you should have figured out all the major stuff already. By the time you get to the end of your plan, you should know what hardware is going to move, the approximate monetary values for all of the moving hardware and who you are going to contract with in order to make everything happen at the price that you want it to happen. Once you have that networking plan down, then it is simply a matter of dealing with your partners and putting things in motion.

This article was brought to you by Lloyd Ross, CEO of Rossdatacom. Lloyd has been involved in the computer networking industry for over 5 years. Rossdatacom is a leading provider of used networking equipment including used cisco routers, used extreme routers, foundry switches, and more.