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CPS Energy serves nearly 850,000 residents of San Antonio, Texas, and the surrounding areas. The electric utility organization is the nation’s largest municipally owned energy company, and it depends on tech leaders like Anand Vedapuri to ensure its technology is modern, efficient, and intentional.
Vedapuri’s tech and IT career spans more than twenty-five years in multiple states and a variety of environments. After spending most of his career based in the Midwest, the current vice president of infrastructure and operations and enterprise architecture moved to the San Antonio area in 2022 to take a job at CPS Energy. Since then, he’s already been promoted twice, and in a short conversation with him, you quickly understand why.
The VP gets down to business quickly. He can detail his wide-ranging transformational plans as easily as some might recite a grocery list. The tech leader has initiated widescale evolution at CPS Energy already, but every plan is multitiered and multiyear. While the scope of those efforts is significant, there is a refrain Vedapuri returns to often: “There is no blank check.”
Vedapuri is fully aware that a municipality-owned energy provider is never going to set records for technological spending. But within those confines, Vedapuri is still capable of some massive modernization efforts to ensure CPS Energy’s future stability.
The basis of the change Vedapuri is driving starts with an architecture-first mindset. The hallmark of this approach demands the answering of three critical questions: How will components interact? How will the system scale as demand grows? Where are the potential bottlenecks or risks? Answering these questions provides upfront consideration of risk mitigation, scalability issues, alignment with business goals, and cost efficiency.
Through this lens, Vedapuri implemented an in-house enterprise architecture practice and began moving the organization forward. “I looked at opportunities for us to grow and transform our foundation,” the VP explains. “I immediately saw the chance to move away from our data centers to the cloud. It wouldn’t just save us a great deal of financial investment; the platform provided by the cloud brings a great deal of efficiency. We went from nothing to 60 percent of our business workloads being located in the cloud.”
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That move includes Microsoft Fabric integration, the move to cloud-based virtual desktops, and a more flexible “pay-as-you-go” model that can expand based on usage and need. “But the cloud is just one lens,” Vedapuri says.
The VP’s team is currently experimenting with generative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot. In December 2024, Vedapuri’s IT service management hub rebranded itself to My Service Hub.
“For the first time, we have enabled a virtual agent for internal requests,” Vedapuri explains. “Whether it’s an incident or a service request, we have trained a generative AI engine for troubleshooting and self-service. That process required building our generative AI policy and strategy, so we now have a roadmap across the organization. We’re excited to continue exploiting generative AI within the City of San Antonio.”
Meanwhile, underneath the city lies some eight hundred miles of fiberoptic cable. Vedapuri says the cable provides yet another opportunity to expand wireless capabilities, evolve CPS’ legacy network, and find more cost savings along the way.
“[T]he business understands that we’re not employing technology because it’s new and cool. We’re doing it to enable business goals, and we want to be an equal partner in achieving those goals.”
Anand Vedapuri
Overall, Vedapuri says these current efforts are all in support of building a new tech baseline to make CPS more capable, nimbler, and more efficient. He emphasizes, however, that this overhaul extends beyond the IT department.
“None of this can be implemented without collaboration with the rest of the business,” Vedapuri says. “And this isn’t just a tech transformation; it’s a business transformation. My peers have been rock-solid in supporting what we’re trying to do. Without their partnership, there is no chance of moving the needle.”
Part of Vedapuri’s job is telling the “big, bold story” of why multiyear transformational efforts are good for CPS Energy as a whole. There will be disruption, there will be hard lessons to learn together, and there is always the chance that something won’t work right the first time. But by helping the larger organization understand the need, the value, and the journey, the VP is helping build consensus.
“Nothing we are doing here is a quick fix,” Vedapuri says. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint. But the business understands that we’re not employing technology because it’s new and cool. We’re doing it to enable business goals, and we want to be an equal partner in achieving those goals. Nobody is coming to you with an open wallet, so your transformation has to start with the bottom line. The more you aid that, the broader the change you can drive.”
That broader change may include a complete ERP implementation, a massive lift for any tech organization. Vedapuri says it will aid the organization’s need for more data analytics capabilities and support the continued push to upgrade legacy systems.
“We’re working to create a larger data pipeline,” Vedapuri says. “That’s what comes after creating this new foundation. One thing leads to another, and I’ve always got one eye looking ahead.”
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