Anyone aware of a "good experience" company for startups that need start providing hardware to employees, but don't want to build an IT department?<p>Seems like a startup should exist to take this pain away.
Go to a good hardware vendor, they will set all this up for you and do it for basically free. If you have custom images you want they charge a small fee per install, but I have used CDW, PCConnection and other companies for this type of work in the past. You send an order to them for a standard business setup, or Engineer setup and then they can drop ship it directly to the employee or to your headquarters. They can image the machines, setup default accounts, make sure specific software is loaded and the correct licenses are on there etc. They are IT in a box for the most part.