What will Citigroup do with userless PCs?

When CITIGROUP announced that it was showing the door to more than 52,000 workers, few wondered what was going to happen to all those people's kit.

A lot of them had laptops, most of them had a PC, which all adds up to a huge amount of gear all of which is going to go on the second-hand market. Citigroup is not going to be the only one with this problem as the recession takes hold.

Bean counters from Gartner said that, while some of the older gear will go to a charity, landfill, or a recycling site, some large companies with a lot of newer gear should try to sell it, or even get the vendor to take it back. Yeah right!

An analyst with Gartner who examines asset management and IT procurement said that some of the larger companies, such as Citigroup, will be looking at the contracts they have with vendors.

He said that IT managers need to be aware of the company’s PC refresh cycle if and when layoffs are announced. Those who have leases from vendors for PCs should look at the contract and see if there is a way to cancel or at least delay an order if those desktops or notebooks are no longer needed.

Outfits like Citigroup should try to make sure the new machines go to other employees who may have older equipment. Then there is the small matter of security. All those computers that no longer have humans sitting in front of them are a data leak waiting to happen, particularly if they are chucked out.

Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM and lesser-known outfits are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of wiping hard drives – for a fat fee – to comply with EU and US law.

They will even completely destroy PCs if there is a concern about security and data.