DATA CENTER COST & PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Price every kilowatt with the cost behind it.

Energy, cooling, M&E, capex and people, traced from the general ledger to each hall, rack, service and customer. Built on Oracle EPCM, so your finance and operations teams run it after go-live.

Cost to serve dashboard in Oracle EPCM: cost by activity per quarter and monthly trend
Cost to serve by activity, from our Oracle EPCM data center demo. Sample data.
30+
Years building cost and profitability models
200+
Integrated EPM models built by our principals
Oracle
PartnerNetwork member · Cloud service expertise
Chair
IMA Profitability & Cost Management SIG
THE PROBLEM

The cost of a data center is invisible where decisions are made

Operators measure PUE and uptime with precision, then price capacity with a market number and a spreadsheet.

Opaque cost

Energy, capex and O&M are never tied to services or customers.

Idle capacity hides

Megawatts built but not sold disappear into the average cost instead of showing as a cost of their own.

Price without a floor

The $/kW comes from the market, with no incremental cost to defend it in a negotiation.

KPIs without a P&L

PUE and availability are tracked, but never translated into margin or return on capital.

Hybrid without one view

On-prem runs on IT financial management and cloud on FinOps, each with its own numbers.

Price, capacity and capex should be decided with the same number.

OUR APPROACH

One cost and value model, layer by layer, from the invoice to the customer

Each step is a set of allocation rules with its own driver. The last step turns cost into rates and KPIs.

01
Facility pools
GL into energy, M&E, shell and people. Driver: account and cost center.
02
Capacity
Pools to halls and racks at practical capacity. Idle capacity shown apart.
03
IT services
Racks to compute, storage and network. Driver: metered kW from DCIM.
04
Customers
Services to customers or business units. Driver: contracted kW, vCPU-hours, GB.
05
Rates & KPIs
LRIC+ price floor, $/kW-month, PUE and % of capacity sold.

ROIC value tree

A handful of KPIs, each traceable to margin or invested capital: capacity sold, energy cost per kWh and capex per MW.

LRIC+ pricing

Long-run incremental cost as the price floor per MW and per rack; stand-alone cost as the ceiling.

Showback and chargeback

Cost per service and per customer, with the kilowatt as the main driver, for enterprise and colocation alike.

SEE IT RUNNING

The model already runs in Oracle EPCM

Screens from our data center demo environment: the same rule cascade, reports and dashboards we adapt to each operator. Figures are sample data, not a client's.

Net margin dashboard by customer segment and sales representative
Margin by customer segment. Hyperscale and wholesale against enterprise retail, by account executive.
Twelve-month data center income statement report
Data center P&L, month by month. Colocation and cloud revenue net of SLA credits, energy and cooling, infrastructure gross margin.
Rule cascade of nine rule sets in the Oracle EPCM Designer
Nine rule sets, GL to customer. Facility pools by m² and kW, direct energy and infrastructure cost, support activities and customer profitability.
Customer profit curve showing potential versus actual profit
The customer profit curve. Which customers create the profit, which ones consume it, and how much is left on the table.
AI INCLUDED

Ask the model in plain language

Oracle EPCM ships AI inside the modeling screens: list and change rules, find which rules depend on a driver such as metered kW, and run calculations by asking. Our StrategicFinance.ai™ agents work on top of the same model.

  • Ask Oracle inside Designer and Calculation Control
  • Impact analysis of a driver change, in seconds
  • Agents for planning, profitability and narrative
Ask Oracle panel listing the rule sets of the data center model
Ask Oracle answering a question about the data center model.
WHO IT IS FOR

Every type of data center recovers its cost with a different driver

Enterprise and on-prem

A cost center recovered through showback or chargeback.

kW allocated per service

Retail colocation

Racks and cages for many tenants; charges kW, space and interconnection.

$/kW-month per rack

Wholesale colocation

Whole halls or MW on long contracts, with real-estate style margins.

$/MW committed

Cloud and hyperscale

Massive campuses at the lowest unit cost, sold as cloud services.

$/vCPU-hour, $/GB-month

Edge

Small sites close to users, where scale is the cost problem.

$/site, $/transaction

AI factories

High-density GPU racks with liquid cooling, run by neoclouds and hyperscalers.

$/GPU-hour
HOW WE START

Start small. Prove it. Then build.

2–3 WEEKS

Cost benchmark

Where your cost per kW stands, which data you already have and what is missing.

1 DAY

Decision sizing workshop

Finance and operations agree on the decisions the model must support: price, capacity, capex.

12–16 WEEKS

Rapid deployment

The model in Oracle EPCM with your GL, DCIM and contracts, handed over to your team.

See your data center in the model

A 45-minute walkthrough of the demo, adapted to your type of facility.

Talk to a principal