The UGI Corporation, a holding company that operates in the natural gas and electric power distribution space, was experiencing storage environment issues with its legacy storage solutions, resulting in recurring business disruptions during maintenance windows, upgrades, and hardware refresh cycles.
That’s where Everpure stepped in.
Why legacy storage is no longer enough to solve business problems
Once UGI began evaluating alternatives, the corporation ultimately selected Everpure to help change how infrastructure upgrades were performed across segments of its enterprise.
“At the time, we had a legacy storage platform that was multiple racks of spinning drives combined with high-speed drives and flash. There were some ongoing pain points that we had to do upgrades. It was very disruptive to the business,” said Eric Frost, UGI Director, Infrastructure Services, in an interview with Channel Insider during Pure Accelerate 2026.
“We had application developers shutting applications down, infrastructure doing the firmware, application networks bringing stuff up. At the end of the maintenance, everybody was having to test before we could go back to function.”
Reducing footprint while improving performance
The migration to Everpure led UGI to achieve dramatic reductions in its infrastructure footprint and significant gains in application performance.
The improvements were so noticeable that business users immediately questioned what had changed.
“It reduced our footprint from two, four-rack spinning drive systems to one rack. As an extension of that, we had always been fighting for performance with the SAP systems,” said Frost.
“Almost overnight, business application owners came back to us and said, ‘What’s changed? What’s happening? Something is not working.’ Because everything was happening substantially faster, and none of the latency that we’d been experiencing in the past, we’re seeing now.”
Eliminating downtime and scaling success
One of the most significant benefits that UGI realized was the ability to perform firmware and hardware upgrades without interrupting business operations.
Frost explained how upgrades became nearly invisible to users, including major controller replacements conducted during business hours.
“We realized that we didn’t have to take the business down. Things would happen to all the systems while we would do upgrades,” said Frost. “We did a controller upgrade. That’s basically the brain of the system. So we did major brain surgery on our SANs, running active production workloads in the middle of the day, and nothing was impacted.”
The initial deployment was such a success that UGI began to scale across other business units to adopt the same approach. Multiple divisions have since transitioned, while additional groups continue evaluating the technology.
“That model was so successful, we then evaluated the other business units and now moved three of the four over,” said Frost. “Utilities moved about a year or so ago. Energy Services moved over about two years ago. The international team has been evaluating it, and they’ve been very happy with it.”
Storage performance and customer service benefits
Storage performance improvements from this transition translated directly into operational improvements for customer service teams.
Faster performance reduced call handling times and improved the customer experience.
“For a long time, we had over 2,000 customer service representatives that were in SAP every day. Those latencies added time to all the calls,” said Frost.
“We were able to shrink that down so that it was not existing, which improved the response time substantially. We saw call time reducing on average from 12 to 16 minutes to around eight minutes, which allowed more customer service representatives to address more calls.”
How backup operations improved
Beyond application performance, UGI also improved backup operations. Backup jobs for UGI once exceeded their allotted windows, but have now become more reliable and significantly faster.
“On the old system, we would sometimes exceed the window that we had for backup jobs. Very often, we had systems that would start Friday, supposed to end Sunday, and maybe they’re going Monday morning,” Frost explained.
He added: “Once we moved to [Everpure], we started to see backup windows shrink dramatically and become much more persistent at being inside the backup window.”
Data governance and reallocating IT talent
As UGI now explores new data intelligence capabilities, Frost explained that data sprawl and governance issues stand out as major obstacles.
Over time, multiple systems have accumulated, creating numerous sources of truth across the organization.
“All the UGI businesses have been here for a very long time, and we have a number of different systems, so we have probably more than one source of truth. If I said ten, I’d probably be underestimating,” Frost mentioned. “We always struggle with where data is, data governance, and where data ownership is. If you don’t know where the data is, you’re at huge risk.”
The simplification of storage management has enabled infrastructure staff to focus on broader technology initiatives rather than maintaining legacy systems.
“I had a specialized subject matter expertise of SAN architecture, and that was a full-time job of working on the SAN. I spent a lot of time and effort with that team, as well as a lot of outside components, to diagnose where my problem is,” said Frost. “Once we shifted away from that technology, and a lot of those bottlenecks organically disappeared, that team was then able to recommit to other technologies.”
UGI’s emerging AI strategy and the next phase of growth
UGI’s measured approach to AI adoption focuses on practical business outcomes rather than chasing trends.
Early projects for the organization have already produced faster-than-expected results.
“We’re doing our best to use AI the way it should be,” Frost mentions. “So we’re not necessarily the fastest, earliest adopters, but we’re trying to find good ideas and keep targeting reasons to have AI.”
Frost detailed an AI initiative targeting invoices, and UGI was able to produce invoice variances in under 30 days – far shorter than expected.
Going forward, UGI sees AI and data initiatives as tools to drive efficiency across the organization, Frost says, from customer service to field operations and logistics.
“We’re starting to see efficiencies. So, like more organizations, they have processing, jobs, and things that have been done the way it’s been done for years – and that’s the way it was done,” said Frost. “If we could do something that saves one of our call center people two or three minutes, and you do that by half a million calls a year – those two or three minutes add up to a substantial amount of time and effort.”
How AI is driving customer sentiment analysis and support
Further, one of UGI’s early AI use cases focused on analyzing customer sentiment and proactively addressing customer concerns before they escalate.
Frost detailed how UGI utilized AI in testing to gauge customer sentiment and determine whether next-level customer service representatives should reach out to offer more help.
According to Frost, the transparency and consistency of Everpure as a technology partner highlight how the company’s investment reflects an understanding of UGI’s business.
“It’s been one of the most transparent technology shifts I’ve ever had with the company,” said Frost. “What they tell you is generally pretty much what they deliver. They’re invested in our company – time and energy – to learn about us, to learn our problems, and help us as a partner, which is something that not everyone does.”