"The megatrend of sustainability affects us in the various areas of daily life, both in our role as consumers, but of course also as decision-makers in the company," explains Nordanex Managing Director Christian Weiss. The topic has therefore continuously gained in importance in recent years. "Sustainability in IT is not an end in itself, but must be economically interesting and secure." Many system houses have already learned that this is the case when working with professional remarketing companies. And now well-known manufacturers are taking back their products and offering them overhauled. With MRM Distribution and bb-net Media, Nordanex deliberately works with complementary quality providers and “doers of conviction”. The Schweinfurt IT refurbisher bb-net has developed into one of the leading IT processors in Europe over the past 25 years. The service portfolio of the company founded by Michael Bleicher includes the purchase of used corporate IT, certified data deletion and data destruction as well as processing and re-marketing including tailor-made rental and leasing concepts. In the meantime, over 65 employees at the Schweinfurt site ensure that around 2000 devices are overhauled every week and brought back to the market under the “tecXL” brand. In addition to IT refurbishment and IT remarketing, the company is also committed to social and ecological projects out of conviction and was the first German IT processor to be certified as climate-neutral. Together with Nordanex, the affiliated system partners are offered high-quality, attractively priced alternatives to new devices as well as the opportunity to offer customers more resource-efficient use of corporate IT.
Sustainability as a success factor
“Anyone who wants to be successful these days should not just pay lip service to sustainability,” says Michael Bleicher. Nevertheless, every fourth German company is investing more than 100.000 euros in the destruction of IT devices and data carriers, even though most of the devices are still fully functional. “If you look at the entire production and supply chain, it quickly becomes clear what large amounts of natural resources are built into the systems. Extending product life cycles not only makes use of the full potential of the devices, but also contributes significantly to the responsible use of natural resources ”, says the bb-net founder. The performance of the devices - at bb-net only business systems that are of a significantly higher quality compared to consumer devices are processed - is so high that they are still fully operational even after years. In addition, customers and partners stand by their side as a service all-rounder and offer, for example, the option of temporarily storing decommissioned IT in a rentable "Green IT Box", picking it up at any time and refreshing or buying it at fair conditions, in order to then process it with data deleted. "The limits of IT refurbishing, however, are set by the IT managers in companies," regrets Bleicher. Because as long as there is no rethinking in dealing with IT hardware and used devices are simply disposed of, the potential of the hardware cannot be used for an extended life cycle. "This leads to significant bottlenecks in availability and is a waste of natural resources that no planet can afford". The fact that MRM Distribution has relied entirely on green from the first idea to the establishment of a reseller network of currently more than 4500 partners leaves no doubt in its business model: MRM is the first distributor for legal, market and manufacturer-compliant trading with software licenses that are no longer required and that were officially running on company or government computers, completely uninstalled and verifiably legally procured by the first purchaser for the European Economic Area (EEA). MRM only acts as a buyer for old licenses for the end customer; These are resold exclusively through registered trading partners. “For us, Nordanex is an extended arm to a very exclusive partner landscape. Nordanex's partners have a very high standard that is set according to customer-oriented quality principles. That fits very well with our values, because trust is the currency of the circular economy, ”emphasizes Managing Director Ernesto Schmutter.
High quality alternatives
“In the past, IT managers often didn't know what to do with their obsolete hardware or licenses that were no longer needed. These relevant resources were often wasted out of concerns about the security of their data or simply out of ignorance, ”reports Nordanex Managing Director Christian Weiss. “Through this cooperation we offer our partners and their customers not only ecologically sensible, but also attractively priced and high quality alternatives. The customer, the system house and, last but not least, the environment benefit from this thanks to the improved ecological footprint. ”Even if there is certainly still a lot of construction and persuasion work to be done, the offer was very positively received. This is also shown by the first projects in which the Nordanex partners were able to score points with the additional offer options. And "you can say: Anyone who has experienced the handling and benefits will also include it as an alternative in future projects."