Not every company has a dinosaur as unofficial company mascot. Not every company has its own band that has played everywhere from New York City to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. And, we are certain that not every company has such a unique culture where balloons, a foosball table and incentive boards share space with laptops, file cabinets and expansive conference rooms.

But, then again, not every company has a 35-year track record like CXtec, a network and voice hardware and cabling solutions provider that has built a rich heritage of saving organizations money on their IT infrastructure needs.

“We help keep our customers’ networks up and their costs down,” CXtec President Peter Belyea told TMCnet in an interview. “The way we differentiate ourselves is based on our performance characteristics. We have the industry’s best performance standards in our niche, allowing our customers to be future-proof.”

Founded in 1978 by William G. Pomeroy, out of a room in his home, CXtec originally operated in the used IBM (News - Alert) System 370 mainframe space. But over the last three decades, Pomeroy has transformed the business, moving into the mainframe cabling, networking and pre-owned spaces. Today, CXtec has made a particularly big splash in the cable and refurbished hardware markets, thanks to both its CABLExpress product line, which provides data center and network cabling solutions, and its equal2new brand, which provides the only certified, refurbished network hardware in the marketplace that comes with a lifetime warranty and 99.51 percent out-of-the-box reliability. 

“My hope is that when customers look at CXtec, they understand we are more than just products,” Belyea said. “We are a resource for education, support and brainstorming and we take what we learn and create value add-ons, going beyond the products and pricing models that you normally think of.”

Pulling Back the Curtain on CABLExpress

While CXtec got its footing in the IBM mainframe business in the ‘70s, by the ‘80s the company focused on mainframe cables, supplying everything from raised flooring and underfloor bus and tag (News - Alert) cables, to ESCON cables, to Token Ring connectors and other legacy products. That history lives on in CXtec’s current CABLExpress product line.

Today, CABLExpress offers a wide variety of high-performance connectivity products and data center infrastructure solutions. Its flagship product set is the Skinny-Trunk Solution—a comprehensive, high-density trunking and fiber cabling system that increases flexibility and improves performance in structured data centers.

“We are all about high performance,” Matthew Graham, director of CABLExpress, told TMCnet. “We are about developing best-in-breed products and bringing them to the marketplace. CABLExpressand high performance go hand-in-hand.”

One of the chief differentiators of CABLExpress is that its products are designed to withstand generations of hardware upgrades, including the shift to 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet. Moreover, its Skinny-Trunk solutions guarantee high performance and lower loss rates, typically 0.25 dB per mated MTP® pair. Other advantages CABLExpress offers include:

• A lifetime warranty on all CABLExpress brand products
• Plug-and-play technology that enables easy installation
• Customized or pre-designed solutions for a variety of data center needs

CABLExpress has established a strong foothold in the commercial, financial services, healthcare and government sectors, as well as a notable presence among Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and large enterprise data centers.

“Any company that has huge storage demands and needs is a perfect fit for our company,” Graham said.

A Deep Dive Into the equal2new Brand

On the other side of the office, just a few doors down, sits the equal2new team, a group that is committed to performance-guaranteed technology equipment. The equal2new brand was created in the mid-‘90s after CXtec noticed that manufacturers were moving much faster than the needs of their customers, forcing them to upgrade technology equipment faster than they wanted or their business needs demanded.

Instead of businesses having to fork over large sums of cash every few years for new technology, CXtec offers an alternative with its certified, pre-owned network and voice hardware. The hardware offers countless benefits including up to 90 percent off list prices, a lifetime warranty with first-year advance replacement, and a 99.51 percent out-of-the-box reliability rating.

“People perceive used equipment as if it was used mechanical equipment that has degraded over time, but pre-owned network equipment doesn’t do that,” Frank Kobuszewski, vice president of the Technology Solutions (News - Alert) Group at CXtec, told TMCnet. “It’s built to last a very long time, has very few moving parts and—if tested and refurbished properly—can last even longer.”

The company receives products—including used Cisco (News - Alert) switches, VoIP phones, routers, etc.—and puts all of them through a rigorous certification process before they receive a seal of approval. The company’s 85,000-square foot Technology Certification and Distribution Center (TCDC) enables CXtec to certify and distribute equal2new equipment. Moreover, the electrostatic discharge (ESD)-protected, dust-free environment ensures that all phases of the reconditioning process are carried out in near clean-room conditions.

According to Kobuszewski, there are countless reasons that companies should be taking advantage of equal2new. Most importantly, the cost savings associated with buying used allows businesses to stretch their budgets further. In addition, CXtec has an expansive inventory of equal2new hardware, meaning the company can provide same-day shipping in most instances with a level of customer support that is second to none.

“We want to give customers options,” Kobuszewski added. “We are here to support the customers and have them upgrade at their own pace. More than half of the time, customers upgrade because manufacturers end-of-life the product; it has nothing to do with the fact that customers need to get away from it. Equal2new is between the used and new market. We have our own space there and along with that brand comes a whole lot of different types of infrastructures that others can’t match.”