Some server parts originally used in Denmark were imported to Japan and a data center in Tochigi Prefecture, located in 100km north of Tokyo, used them. A Japanese engineer in charge of the acceptance check of the parts said impressively, “No problem at all, despite coming from far Denmark!” Then Kazuhito Yamada, CEO of DataLive Coporation, realized that DataLive could produce value for customers through trading refurbished IT equipment globally.
DataLive Corporation was founded in December 2003. Though DataLive was started as a developer of software, Yamada soon expanded the business to procurement of preowned PCs to meet customer demands. One day Yamada found many discarded servers in the warehouse of a Japanese leasing company, where he visited to buy their PCs. The servers faced the end of lease term, but to the eyes of Yamada, who has a background in infrastructure engineering, they were still useful and remained a long way from the end of life. Yamada couldn’t help but saying “I would like to buy not only your used PCs, but also those servers.” Since then DataLive has started to sell/buy preowned servers.
At that time,there were few trader of preowned/refurbished servers in Japan, DataLive received inquiries from all over the country when their website was open. Nevertheless, Yamada was not certain how big the market size of refurbished servers would be in the future in Japan.
The turning point of DataLive business was caused by an e-mail from the US. It was bulk purchase approach for a refurbished server on DataLive website. Since the sender seemed friendly, Yamada jumped in with questions about the US market. He kindly told Yamada the current situation of IT refurbishment industry in the US（Ex.”Using refurbished servers are common for many US companies.” “Online/Offline marketplaces for refurbishers have been established.”, etc）. Yamada still remembers vividly that while reading his reply mail, he found rays of hope in the future because Japan IT market usually follows US. Yamada immediately and completely steered DataLive business toward IT refurbishment,especially of servers and networking equipment.
DataLive’s corporate message is “We help clients optimize IT investment”. Yamada says, “Servers are quintessence of ever-improving IT technology. Of course creating new servers is important for human progress, but utilizing servers to the utmost limit is also important for environmental and economic sustainability. We want to make a social contribution through DataLive IT refurbishment business.”
