AMI’s IT retirement deal with ICT Services worth €150,000

AMI has been appointed by ICT Services to manage the collection and data sanitisation of its customers’ laptops, PCs and other data bearing devices. Many of these devices – including 95% of laptops – are recycled and resold, following complete data sanitisation and refurbishment. The deal is worth €150,000.

ICT Services employs over 100 people across the island of Ireland. It provides IT hardware sales, installation and maintenance services for PCs, laptops, servers, storage and networks. Its customers include large public and private sector organisations as well as SMEs who depend on it to keep their IT running around-the-clock.

The need for AMI was initially driven by some very large deals secured by ICT Services with public health organisations and leading multi-nationals to replace fleets of end-of-life desktop PCs, laptops and servers for its security conscious clients. The devices were located all over Ireland, and such a complex collection task was made all the more difficult by the need to provide failsafe guarantees that no data would remain on retired devices.

By refurbishing and reselling good quality data sanitised devices via AMI’s resale site, refreshedbyus.com and its global network of 350 bulk buyers, ICT Services can offer the most competitive IT renewal and retirement solutions to its customers.

John Roche, business development manager, ICT Services commented: “The big surprise for us was the value that AMI was able to unlock by reselling retired equipment. This gives us a very significant competitive advantage as it allows us to provide a more cost effective service than our competitors.”

“For our security conscious customers, AMI provided the lowest risk solution. When you are dealing with the collection of more than 5,000 data bearing devices, in hundreds of locations across the country, you get some idea of the challenge. When you add in the need to securely record, track, and ensure zero risk of any data leakages or breach of data protection regulations, you can see that we are dealing with a mammoth task.

“AMI provides some unique advantages. Firstly we knew from our visit to the AMI Data Erasure Labs, that its technologically advanced processes and equipment were ahead of anything else available in Ireland from a data security perspective. The Blancco data erasure software it uses exceeds the highest government security specifications in 15 countries, including the US, Germany and Britain. It is also the only Irish company accredited to perform secure data erasures by the world’s leading standards body, ADISA.

“We also love the ease with which it manages this really challenging and complex process. We simply give them the collection locations and customer contact details and AMI takes care of everything from that point.”

Faye Thomas, business manager, AMI, said: “Our end-to-end asset tracking and tagging ensures that ICT Services has real-time information on what stage of the retirement process customer devices have reached and this allows its team to stand over its service.

“We really work hard to make things easy for ICT Services’ end customers too. Many of them don’t have a lot of storage space, meaning that as soon as the old machines are ready to be collected we need to be there. Thankfully, the AMI Collection Crew doesn’t require any assistance, and we can collect from multiple points on the client site to ensure that things run smoothly.”