Other vendors may not face the counterfeiting issues Cisco does (read about Cisco's elaborate remarketing program), but most nonetheless have programs for certifying used equipment. Here’s a rundown.

Nortel

Nortel, for example, has a secondary-market assurance program to verify that secondary-market equipment meets the company’s technical requirements for safety, reliability and integrity. Nortel offers software relicensing, product inspection and auditing, hardware baselining, compatibility testing, and so forth.

“Most of our customers … understand what they’re getting direct [from the manufacturer],” says Len Anderson, secondary market business manager at Nortel. “There’s no misinterpretation of what they’re getting.”

Nortel performs a remote Network Integrity Assessment and delivers results to the buyer in a Certification Report, which identifies the equipment and highlights any issues that inhibit certification. All enterprise equipment must be installed, tested and commissioned according to Nortel procedures to be eligible for recertification, upon which the equipment and network are eligible for contract-level technical support service and warranty.

Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks stresses that its hardware should always be purchased directly from a company sales representative or through a recognized reseller.

“When hardware is obtained through other channels, such as an e-commerce site or a third party, there is no guarantee of product quality or service protection,” the company states in its ExtremeWorks Hardware Inspection program brochure.

Extreme offers two types of inspections: an ExtremeWare Operational System Report and a Physical Hardware Inspection. The ExtremeWare Operational System Report is a software inspection that is compiled from command line interface output and is reviewed by an Extreme technical support engineer (TSE). This report should provide enough detail for the TSE to determine if the equipment is functioning correctly under normal conditions.

The Physical Hardware Inspection will be conducted by a field systems engineer. This inspection involves an analysis of the hardware condition at the location where the equipment resides at the time of service contract execution. Upon completion of the Physical Hardware Inspection, a hardware inspection form is completed for service contracts records.