BS CSC 2003

Graduating in 2003 with a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics, Jerry Tillman is an experienced Global Services leader with a demonstrated history of working in the Information Technology and Services industry. Skilled in Cloud, Development, Storage, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Jerry is currently Vice President of IBM’s Cloud Platform Services, where he serves as the head of Engineering for the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) portfolio totalling roughly $150M of the overall IBM Cloud business. He leads a global team responsible for the revenue generating service offerings on the platform. His responsibilities include the business strategy, development, delivery and service availability of the PaaS offerings across Dev & Data Services worldwide.

Under Jerry's leadership, the IBM's Cloud Container offering has grown 13% YoY, while IBM's Distributed Cloud offering has grown by an impressive 566% YoY. At the same time, he was able to grow multiple areas of the portfolio, contributing significantly to IBM's overall margins in the Cloud space while driving down costs. He’s also delivered for several key anchor clients such as BNP Paribas, American Airlines and Citigroup.

From a Service Delivery Standpoint, Jerry’s leadership resulted in a reduction of overall client impacting events across IBM’s entire Cloud portfolio. His Incident Management expertise helped drive service improvements resulting in a stable platform for IBM’s clients. Specific achievements included a 91% reduction YTY for Severity 1 volumes, a 16% reduction in Severity 2 volumes, and a 7% reduction in incidents caused by change while improve velocity as change volumes grew by 32%.

Jerry has received a number of significant honors and accolades demonstrating his leadership in the engineering space including:

• Best of IBM Honoree - One of IBM's highest individualized honors - Awarded to only IBM's Top 1000 high performance employees in the company.

• IBM People Manager Award Winner - Awarded for outstanding people leadership amongst your peers across the business unit

• Black Engineer of the Year (BEYA) - Modern Day Technology Leader Award winner

Jerry spends significant time volunteering in multiple areas, lending his expertise as well as mentoring young and upcoming engineers. He has participated in several Executive chats where he speaks with college students with an interest in tech. He is also an Executive sponsor for IBM’s Accerlation Program which focuses on over 400 college interns and helps provide meaningful projects for the students to have an opportunity to apply their classroom efforts in the real world. Jerry also serves on IBM's Black Executive Council as a Board Member covering all of IBM, and he is a member of the Site Reliability Engineering Global Governance Board. He has served as a speaker and panelist for the likes of NC Tech - State of Technology, and the Seneca Resources Professional Resources Panel.

NC State holds a special place in his heart, as it is here that he met his wife Courtney. He maintains strong ties with the department of computer science, serving as a member of the Computer Science Strategic Advisory Board and serving as the special keynote speaker for the Spring 2023 Computer Science Diploma Ceremony.

Being a man of strong faith, Jerry recognizes how blessed he is and says that none of the achievements in his career would have been possible if not for God’s grace and mercy. He also thanks his wife Courtney, son Micah and daughter Mikayla for their love, encouragement and steadfast support, calling them the driving force to his success.