Is Leasing Really Worth It?

llamaluvr asks: "As I understand it, there are some financial benefits for businesses leasing hardware equipment. Does anybody know what exactly those are, and how much they really help? Do they really outweigh the additional costs of replacing, repackaging, and returning old hardware? How do the size of the business and the computing environment affect these benefits? Additionally, what is the best balance between leasing and purchasing equipment -- would leasing desktops and laptops, but purchasing monitors be best, or should one just lease everything?"

"A little bit of background: I work in the IT Operations department for a BU of a Fortune 100 company, and we lease practically everything right now. We have 4 full-time employees for about 800 workstations, and, while we seem to have enough manpower for managing projects and tickets, we have a tough time getting to returning the equipment, so a lot of it is already late. Complicating this is that many of these PCs are in a harsh industrial environment, and often have at least one failing part, which then costs us a fraction of the entire workstation (for example: a busted floppy might cost us $150 or more, unless we test the PC and replace the part, of course). Corporate has been more attentive to this drain on our time and money lately, and they have talked of outsourcing this process, but in the meantime, we're stuck with it. BTW, we lease IBM equipment through ePlus."

Re:Too Many Factors

[krunchyfrog]

A little bit of background: I have a value of x somewhere between 0 and pi.

Mmmmmmmm pie...

Re:Too Many Factors

[HermDog]

Snark aside, this really isn't an issue where you should be guided by ancedotal evidence posted to Slashdot. You're working for a Fortune 100 company, for crying out loud--you need a carefully-planned methodology, not a bunch of yammering 'experts' giving you off-the-cuff advice on a very complex problem...

I used to work for a Fortune 50 company, where these types of decisions were evidently often made based on which vendor had the cutest sales staff.

Re:Leasing servers

[netsrek]

and here I was planning to reorganise my company based upon the word of someone called Lord Dimwit Flathead who posted on Slashdot... :(

Re:Nonsense

[jimicus]

I think the two worst I've seen were a "1 hour on-site response" contract with Xerox that required 6 months to repair a single piece of hardware,

Now now, be reasonable. That could still be one hour, the just didn't specify which hour.

Re:Too Many Factors

[SlashdotMeNow]

Hmmm... Note to self: Hire more cute sales staff.

Lord Dimwit

[SoCalEd]

True enough. After all, look what happened to his empire. He couldn't even keep his flood control dams online....