Paul Kent is Vice President of Big Data initiatives at SAS. He spends his time discussing, evangelizing and developing software at the confluence of big data and high performance computing. Paul was previously Vice President of the Platform R&D division at SAS and led groups responsible for the SAS foundation and mid-tier technologies, teams that develop, maintain and test Base SAS®, as well as related data access, storage, management, presentation, connectivity and middleware software products. Paul joined SAS in 1984 and contributed to the development of SAS software components including PROC SQL, TCP/IP connectivity, the Output Delivery System (ODS) and high-performance initiatives. A strong customer advocate, Paul is widely recognized within the SAS community for his active participation in the community and at local and international user conferences. Paul was educated at WITS in South Africa, graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce with honors followed by graduate work interrupted to try an North American postin. He previously used computers to make better business decisions in the gold division of Anglo American.