Professional Overview

 

Mara Ervin is the Owner and Founder of Mara Jade Consulting (MJC), a data center advisory firm built on more than 20 years of hands-on experience in the mission-critical industry. Based in Virginia, Mara works with data center operators, developers, and owners across the United States, guiding them through the full spectrum of infrastructure decisions — from space and power strategy through to connectivity, cooling, and fit-out.

Over two decades in the industry, Mara has built one of the most extensive networks in the mission-critical space, spanning data center builders, operators, manufacturers, architecture and engineering firms, consultants, general contractors, integrators, and subject-matter experts. She is known for a customer-centric approach that goes beyond advice — she stays in the problem with her clients until it is solved, and she moves at the speed the market demands.

Three values define how Mara works: trust, authenticity, and transparent communication. She understands that data center development is a people business as much as a technical one, and she brings that understanding to every engagement, every partner relationship, and every conversation.

​

Career Journey

​

Building Expertise Across the Mission-Critical Stack

 

Mara's career spans more than two decades of leadership roles across the data center and mission-critical infrastructure industry. She has worked at senior levels with operators, vendors, and advisory organizations, accumulating deep technical and commercial knowledge across power, cooling, connectivity, modular deployments, and colocation — building expertise from the ground up at a time when the data center market was undergoing its most rapid period of growth and transformation.

That breadth of experience gave Mara something that cannot be taught in a single discipline: a whole-system view of what it takes to deliver and operate mission-critical infrastructure. She can walk into a conversation about substation design, high-density cooling, AI compute deployments, or owner's-rep project management and engage with equal command — because she has lived each of those problems alongside the clients and teams navigating them.

​

Mara Jade Consulting — Founder & Owner

 

Mara founded Mara Jade Consulting to give data center operators and developers a single, trusted advisor they could rely on across the full infrastructure lifecycle. In a market crowded with vendors selling individual products and services, MJC's model is deliberately different: one advisor, one relationship, and access to a deep partner alliance and SME ecosystem across every layer of the data center stack.

MJC serves as a trusted representative for operators, guiding them through the selection process for space, power, containment, and connectivity — hyper-focused on speed, execution, and efficiency. MJC's service areas span the full data center stack:

​

• Power: on-site power solutions, substation design and development, turnkey microgrid systems, generation, solar, wind, battery plants, HV & MV switchgear, PDUs, busway systems, rack-level power distribution, and power management and monitoring.

• Cooling: air-cooled solutions, liquid cooling, immersion cooling, chilled water systems, precision air conditioning, chillers, cooling towers, and sustainable cooling technologies.

• Connectivity: HPC/HDP/AI preconfigured solutions, rack and stack, fiber optic infrastructure, high-speed data cables, GPU and storage interconnects, cable management, and OSP solutions.

• Modular: containerized data centers, modular power distribution, prefabricated substations, BESS enclosures, modular UPS rooms, and E-House solutions.

• Space: wholesale and retail colocation, powered shells, cages, data halls, modular solutions, suites, cloud-on-ramp, and edge colocation.

​

MJC's Role with Secure Fiber OPS

 

Mara and MJC serve as the US business-development and positioning partner for Secure Fiber Ops (SFO). MJC's role is to open doors, develop and hold client and developer relationships, position SFO's capabilities against the real pain points owners face, and bring SFO in to deliver the cost-management, project-management, and infrastructure work those owners need.

The partnership is grounded in a shared read of the US market: a sustained, capitalintensive data center buildout driven by cloud and AI compute demand, significant costoverrun and schedule-risk exposure on the owner side, and a growing tier of neocloud and AI operators who move fast and value a focused, proven partner over a legacy brand name. That market need is exactly where Mara's network and SFO's execution capability intersect.

Mara's industry relationships — built over 20 years across operators, developers, AE firms, general contractors, and integrators — are the commercial engine that places SFO into the right conversations. Active engagements MJC has developed and positioned SFO into include the DataNovaX / Pioneer Park campus in Wichita Falls, TX, and the Maverick Development portfolio in The Woodlands, TX — spanning a 3-5 megawatt data center, a veterans community development, and a mixed-use commercial project.

MJC continues as SFO's positioning and business-development partner as the business grows — sourcing relationships, placing SFO into engagements, and leading business development in the Virginia corridor while Eric Thomson drives the Texas and defensesector pipeline.
 

​

Building for the US Market

 

Mara's focus extends beyond individual engagements. Her goal — shared with Eric Thomson and SFO — is to build a business that becomes a recognized, respected presence in the US data center market: one that wins work on merit, delivers consistently, and grows organically from a foundation of proven performance.

Central to that vision is building an American team. As SFO's project pipeline converts and scales, the plan is to bring on US-based staff — infrastructure professionals, project managers, and site personnel who are embedded in the markets SFO serves. Mara believes that a business built to last in the US needs to employ American workers, invest in American talent, and become part of the communities and industries it operates in.

That commitment shapes how MJC approaches every relationship and every engagement: not as a transaction, but as a building block toward something larger. The clients, developers, and operators MJC works with today are the foundation of a track record that will support that growth — and the team that will deliver it will be built here, in the United States.

Mara's standard is consistent with SFO's: only the best will do.