Mastering The Secondary Market
Rick Weinberg
Founder, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at California Business Journal (CalBizJournal.com)
Christian Saunders and his partners at OSI Hardware found success selling hundreds of millions of dollars of pre-owned network hardware backed with better warranties than the original manufacturers. Now their newly launched Systain IT Services business is taking on OEM technical support programs by delivering more responsive service at lower cost.
BY RICK WEINBERG, CALIFORNIA BUSINESS JOURNAL
There’s an expression that today’s faster pace of life is due to everything “moving at Internet speed.” Nowhere is this more applicable than in the tech industry, which dreams up new ways of managing data, storing information and delivering services quicker than a mouse click.
In just the past several years alone, dozens of new catchphrases have sprung up seemingly out of nowhere: Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Big Data, Crypto Currency, Apps, Machine Learning, Chatbots, Cloud Computing, Natural Language Programming, Augmented Reality, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, MRR and a veritable alphabet soup of other acronyms.
To many non-gearheads, these futuristic concepts may seem like out of a 1950s science fiction movie. Yet, to investors, technologists and the industries birthed by these modern marvels, each represent game-changing paradigms potentially worth billions of dollars annually.
However, when it comes to rapidly evolving industries, nothing compares to the massive $350 billion global market for business hardware and services, according to Christian Saunders, co-founder and CEO of OSI Global IT Services in Santa Barbara, Calif.
“In the nearly 20 years I’ve been involved in the enterprise hardware sector, the changes in product performance and customer expectations are breathtaking,” he says. “If the auto industry moved this fast, we’d not only be talking about electrically-powered, self-driving vehicles, but they’d be shuttling us back and forth to another solar system.”
Most of the radical shifts Saunders and Systain co-founders Joey Leonard and Jordan Quivey have seen have been through the lens of IT products bought and sold on the “secondary market.”
Read the rest of the story here -- https://calbizjournal.com/osi-hardware-systain-it-services/