How Leasing Beat the Cloud in Cost and Efficiency

CSI Leasing Customer:

  • A leading global provider of technology products and solutions to more than 36,000 resellers
  • Fortune 1000 company
  • Headquartered in the Southeast with locations in the U.S., Canada, Latin America and Europe

Current Challenges

The company was leasing a few storage devices and servers from CSI, but their enterprise software, the backbone of the organization, was run in the cloud. In addition to the cost of the cloud-based solution, the company often ran into customer service issues. Outages were taking longer to recover, and the manufacturer was prioritizing other customer outages over theirs. Additionally, for a company that made frequent acquisitions, they were constantly creating new service level agreements and managing tickets to add users.

The Solution

Since the customer was preparing to refresh their existing data center with CSI, they decided to explore leasing infrastructures and run the enterprise software in-house. After doing the math, they discovered a $1 million per year savings by leasing the storage and computers from CSI. These savings included the professional services that it would take to move the system out of the cloud and into their data center.  By running the software internally, not only will the company save money, they will save significant downtime by resolving outages themselves instead of waiting on a third party. Additionally, leasing allowed them to continue capturing the monthly spend as an operating expense.

How CSI Did It

CSI was already leasing to this company and they were very pleased with our personal attention and ability to help them problem solve. With CSI’s help, this was a seamless transition that resulted in huge savings. Another bonus for the customer? Since CSI is independent of vendors and manufacturers, they were able to switch storage platforms without an issue. The project encompassed equipment from three different manufacturers and CSI was able to roll it all into one lease.

Translation to Cost Savings

Their current annual spend would have been about $6 million if they had simply refreshed their data center and stayed in the cloud. By investing about $3 million in infrastructure within their own data center, they will achieve savings of $1 million per year. This includes all the resources they need to run everything internally.