Client Conversation: Evergy

Thanks again for taking time today to talk with me about Evergy and your experience with US Cloud. I know Evergy is a utility company serving Kansas and Missouri. But if you had to explain Evergy in a nutshell—kind of an elevator pitch—what would you say?

There are a lot of ways to describe it. We’re essentially the result of a merger between two long-standing utility companies—Westar and KCP&L—about six years ago. That merger created Evergy. We now serve about one and a half million customers across most of Kansas and Missouri.

We have a heavy reliance on Microsoft products. Our technology spans from office staff to mobile devices in trucks, supporting fieldwork during storms. That includes everything from power plants to wind and solar farms. Our technology products enable all of that to function efficiently and help the business operate more effectively.

Thank you for that—it’s really helpful. So you rely on Microsoft products to ensure your team can keep energy flowing to customers, even during storms or other difficult conditions.

Exactly. If those systems fail, it could interrupt service to customers, and that creates a domino effect.

Right. It sounds like technology is essential to continuity.

Yes. People might assume utilities are low-tech, but that’s far from the truth. When someone joins Evergy, they quickly see how advanced we are. We’re often trying to leverage bleeding-edge technologies and keep pace with other top-tier utility companies.

Artificial intelligence and other innovations are absolutely on the table. The world demands more from us every day. We’re always asking: How can we communicate better with customers? How do we do more proactive maintenance? How do we automate remediation in the field when there are outages?

There are countless areas of the company relying on different applications and technologies. It’s an enormous effort that never slows down. We’re always looking for ways to improve reliability, affordability, and efficiency.

Absolutely.

One more thing—we’re somewhere on the Fortune 500 list. I’m not sure exactly where we are right now, but we’re in that range.

That’s great. Thank you. Now, stepping back a bit—before you started working with US Cloud—what was your experience like with Microsoft support? What was the tipping point that made it clear you needed a change?

That’s a key question. Microsoft technologies have evolved rapidly, but their support has struggled to keep up. Also, the cost of Microsoft support has risen significantly.

As a regulated utility, we’re always under financial scrutiny. We’ve had to evaluate if we’re getting the value we need from our investments. With Microsoft support, we found that costs were increasing while the value seemed to decline. We needed to explore other options that could deliver comparable or better value—ideally at a lower cost.

That makes sense.

Which led us to the transition to US Cloud.

After moving to US Cloud, have your expectations been met? Have some of those issues been resolved?

Yes. With the exception of issues that only Microsoft can address—which we all understand—we get resolutions from US Cloud that are just as good or better.

That’s great to hear.

With Microsoft, if we wanted really high-level support, we would have had to pay significantly more to get a dedicated engineer. That wasn’t feasible for us.

That might have been the only thing that could have turned our experience around with Microsoft. But with what we had under Premier Support, we didn’t feel we were getting strong support or fast resolution.

Right.

With US Cloud, we feel like we’re treated as an actual client. With Microsoft, it felt like we were just another number. Now they outsource much of their support, so it’s the luck of the draw who you get. With US Cloud, I know that if there’s ever an issue with a ticket, I can reach out to our Technical Account Manager directly and get guidance or attention on the matter.

That’s really good to hear. That kind of experience—feeling like a priority—is one of our goals for all clients. Is there a specific situation or ticket that made you realize the difference in support?

It’s hard to remember a specific one—it’s been about four years now.

Totally understandable. If there’s anything more recent that illustrates the difference, that works too.

That’s tough.

Matt doesn’t submit most of the tickets himself—it’s usually the team under him. You might want to check with Dwayne or others who handle more of the ticket submissions.

Yes, that’s true. Dwayne handles a lot of our Azure-related tickets, and there are others for different areas.

We also get a lot of ticket surveys from Dwayne and Rocky—they’d be great to ask. They don’t hold back with their feedback.

That’s helpful, thank you. I’d love to hear what they have to say as well.

A lot of the tickets are related to new or emerging technologies. The older, legacy on-prem stuff rarely causes issues anymore. It’s usually the newer services.

Makes total sense. Final question before we wrap up—do you have anything else you’d like to share about how things are going with US Cloud?

Not really. We get what we need when we need it. I think of it like a car warranty—when something breaks, we submit the ticket, it gets taken care of, and we move on.

If we ever question something or feel something is off, it gets addressed. Or we get a professional reminder of the process and why things happened a certain way. We always seem to get on the same page and move forward.

That’s great. Thank you so much!