Oliver Schabenberger, a former college professor who joined SAS in 2002, is the privately held software firm’s new chief technology officer.

Schabenberger succeeds Armistead Sapp, who retired last month from SAS where he had worked for the past 27 years. Sapp is preparing to launch his own startup.

A spokesperson for SAS confirmed Schabenberger’s promotion to WRAL TechWire over the weekend.

Schabenberger holds several patents in software design and algorithms.

Before taking the CTO position, Schabenberger  led the Analytic Server R&D division. He now will lead research and development efforts for SAS, a global leader in analytics.

“Analytics is not just at the heart of what we do, it is the force that inspires and drives change across organizations,” he says in his corporate bio.

Schabenger joined SAS after serving as an associate professor of statistics at Virginia Tech from 1999-2002. Earlier he was an assistant professor of statistics in the Crop and Soil Sciences department at Michigan State. He received a PhD from Virginia Tech in 1995.

His bio follows:


Biography: Oliver Schabenberger

As Chief Technology Officer, Oliver Schabenberger leads SAS’ Research and Development division, shaping the vision for R&D employees worldwide – and providing the resources needed to produce the highest quality software in areas such as advanced analytics, business intelligence, customer intelligence, data management, fraud and security intelligence, and risk management, as well as industry-specific solutions.

Over a decade of involvement in all aspects of R&D has uniquely positioned Schabenberger to oversee the software innovation strategy that helps businesses transform and grow through analytics. “Analytics is not just at the heart of what we do, it is the force that inspires and drives change across organizations,” he said. This focus on advanced analytics technologies such as machine learning, cognitive analytics, deep learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing continues to keep SAS at the forefront of change.

During his time at SAS, Schabenberger led the Analytic Server R&D division, where he and his team developed a high-performance analytics architecture that helps customers solve problems and identify opportunities much faster than through traditional computing environments. Under his leadership, a scalable analytic server was developed for visual analytics and visual statistics solutions, which gives users greater flexibility to explore and visualize data of any size.

Schabenberger’s role in the Analytic Server division also drove advances in SAS® Event Stream Processing software, which gives customers the ability to analyze real-time streaming data generated from the internet of things, as well as respond more predictively around issues such as fraud prevention, cyberdefense and energy consumption. In addition, he authored many programming tools that have played a key role in the development of SAS software.

Before joining SAS in 2002, Schabenberger served as Assistant Professor of Statistics in the Crop and Soil Sciences department at Michigan State University (1996 to 1999) and as Assistant Professor of Statistics in the Statistics department of Virginia Tech (1999 to 2002). He was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of Statistics at Virginia Tech in 2001. Prior to that, he received his PhD from Virginia Tech in 1995.

In addition to co-authoring three statistical textbooks, Schabenberger is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He holds several patents on software design and algorithms.

Source: SAS