The Data Problem Costing You Power Deals
By Matt Mescall, Space & Power Product Manager
Everyone is talking about power, from securing it to selling it to keep up with demand. But there’s a big problem that’s losing you deals. The reality is, many companies are still relying on disparate systems, or worse: mission critical Excel, to track their capacity. And the downstream effects of data that’s always weeks behind reality is that teams lose faith in their reports, and their quoting cycle takes months.
The Real Reason Your Quote Cycle Takes 30-60 Days (or Longer)
I’m now a Product Manager for Carma, but I’ve worked in the industry and seen all this play out first-hand. The demand for power is high, yet when major customers show up asking what you can deliver, most operators can’t give them a number they trust quickly.
Here’s what’s happening:
It all comes down to a lack of real-time information. You have no clue what’s been sold since the last monthly report, let alone what’s been quoted or yet to be provisioned.
When Sales and Operations don’t have real-time data to make informed decisions quickly, Sales often wants to push deals through, which can lead to double-booking, and operations often push back and want to double-check the numbers. And the truth is, these teams are likely looking at completely different reports, so there’s no trust or agreement.
In my career, I was often conservative to avoid double-selling. But what happens is: the sales process slows down so much that you might be only handling one deal at a time as rooms near capacity. While you’re waiting on a definitive answer for Customer A, Customer B is sitting in the queue, not even getting a quote until you know the outcome of the other potential sale. Some customers get tired of waiting and go elsewhere.
Oversubscription Makes Matters Worse
Oversubscription adds another layer of complexity.
Even when operators have agreed-upon oversubscription limits, enforcing them in practice requires everyone to be working from the same capacity number. They rarely are.
I've seen this play out where operations needed to review the data every time sales wanted to put a customer in a space that was technically oversubscribed. That process could take two weeks because Operations and Sales can’t agree on what data is the source of truth.
Sales and Ops are often at odds, and some of that is culture. But a lot of it is simply that they don't share a single system.
The irony is that oversubscription, done intelligently, is how you maximize revenue from the power you already have. You don't always need new utility capacity or a new building. Sometimes you just need better distribution and the data to know where the headroom actually is. Again, a missed opportunity that’s costing you revenue all because of data.
What Changes When Everyone Works from the Same Data
When power is modeled as inventory, down to the individual circuit and PDU, and that inventory is connected to live sales and operational data, the dynamic between sales and operations changes.
Oversubscription limits get defined once, agreed upon, and built into the system. When a deal comes in, everyone can see the same available capacity number. There's nothing to reconcile.
That’s a huge value of Carma’s platform: You can see what's sold, what's provisioned, and what's actually being used. In real-time.
Over time, those consumption trends are exactly what informs smarter sales and oversubscription decisions.
With that foundation in place, quoting hyperscale power doesn't require a week of internal meetings. The answer is already in the system. A 30-60 day cycle becomes 30-60 minutes.
The First-Mover Advantage in a Constrained Market
Customers are talking to multiple providers at the same time. They know who responds fast and who goes quiet for a month. The operators who can come back with a confident, accurate quote quickly, not a conservative placeholder while the team figures it out, are the ones building the relationships that lead to repeat business.
Data accuracy is also what unlocks stranded capacity. Operators with clean, real-time power inventory often find usable headroom they didn't know they had. Add a UPS here, rethink your distribution there. The data makes those decisions obvious instead of speculative.
The operators building this infrastructure now will be the ones who quote first, win more, and leave less capacity on the table.
See how Carma helps data centers respond to hyperscale power demand faster. Request a demo.
Author Bio: Matt Mescall
Matt is Carma’s product manager responsible for space and power functionality. With an engineering background and over 15 years of experience in data centers, Matt brings first-hand expertise to Carma’s product development.