Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Jay Upchurch serves the internal and external customers and partners of SAS by helping them strategically embrace technology to manage the markets of today while preparing for the challenges of tomorrow. His role is two-fold: leading SAS’ global IT organization, and serving as business lead for SAS Cloud.

Upchurch is passionate about strategic planning and delivering the technology investments, people and processes necessary to realize the vision of the company. That understanding of where organizations are compared to where they want to be allows him to help SAS and its customers nimbly maneuver in today’s ever-changing market by leveraging the cloud, human capital and other resources necessary to achieve their goals.

“In a world of constantly market conditions and business needs, it’s important that organizations align their corporate strategy with their technology investments in order to be prepared for the challenges of tomorrow,” says Upchurch. “At SAS, I’m proud to help our customers and partners do just that as they combine the unmatched power of SAS’ AI and analytics with flexibility and scalability of the cloud.”

Upchurch is an accomplished and award-winning technology leader with more than 24 years’ experience leading global cloud, SaaS, managed hosting and managed application organizations.

Prior to joining SAS, Upchurch served as Vice President of Hospitality and Retail Cloud at Oracle, overseeing design, delivery and ongoing operations. He joined Oracle when they acquired MICROS Systems. At MICROS, Jay served as Chief Information Officer and led Global Hosting and SaaS. Prior to MICROS, Upchurch held various leadership appointments at AT&T, USinternetworking and Interpath Communications.

Upchurch holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.