Renting IT Equipment?

Has anyone ever rented IT equipment for their organization? How did it go? Were you happy with renting versus purchasing? What IT equipment is wise to rent and are there big-ticket items you think should absolutely be purchased and not rented? Share your experiences.

Do you mean leasing?

Leasing's pretty much the norm in enterprise environments (big companies). Usually you have an option to buy the equipment at the end of the lease. Otherwise, it's returned.

I personally have not been privy to cutting any lease deals, but I'm sure there's caveats. Anything missing, your organization is probably liable for it. And then you got monthly payments.

Fwiw, desktops are usually leased, servers I'm not so sure.

I have never run across rental IT equipment other than test equipment such as a Network analyzer or wiring test equipment. (I believe you could rent fiber termination equipment too)

If you had a short term project like a boiler room with 500 work stations, you could rent the equipment to set it up and it was going to be used for less than a month.

If it was going to be used for a couple of years or more than leasing is the way to go.

The advantage of leasing for a non profit has acouple of advantages.

1. it moves the expense to operating budget instead of a capital budget. It can even out cash flow issues as you have a monthly expense instead of the large outlay of funds to pay for your project.
(you could just borrow money to pay for the project too)

2. Now that you have a monthly expense that is ongoing at the end of the lease you can get all new equipment for hopefully a minimum increase in the monthly expense. Otherwise you pay for the project up front and have to budget and raise the funds n number of years down the road for an equipment refresh.

3. On something like a copier or printer, if it is pretty much worn out at the end of the lease, you let them take it away and don't have to dispose of it. (However some leases force you to pay the shipping of the items to the return center at your expense)

The disadvantage of the lease

1. You are on the lease's time frame so if your server lease expires on December 24 you better have your new server in place and running before that date or you will pay dearly for the month to month continuation of the lease, or do with out the equipment because you had to ship it away.

2. You have to be sure your Accounts Payable department is on top of lease payments and you can make the decisions at the end of the lease. If AP misses the end of lease notices you may go on the month to month for another year not realizing your lease is up and you could have bought out the lease for the value of one payment.

3. There are not any tax advantages to the non profit for leasing.

4. Bottom line you are borrowing money and having to pay for that money to finance your project.

Dave