Donald F. Ferguson

Chief Architect for IBM's Software Group, Ferguson provided overall technical leadership for IBM WebSphere, Tivoli Software, IBM DB2, Rational Software, and Lotus Software products. He has served as Vice President and CTO for software at Dell, having previously served as CTO, Distinguished Engineer, and Executive VP at Computer Associates (CA), Inc. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1989. His thesis studied the application of economic models to the management of system resources in distributed systems.

He began his career at IBM in 1985, where he worked for over twenty years. He was appointed IBM Fellow in 2001, IBM's highest technical honor. As Chief Architect for IBM's Software Group (SWG), he also chaired the SWG Architecture Board (SWG AB), which focused on product integration, cross-product initiatives, and emerging technology. Some of the public focus areas were web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development.

Ferguson guided IBM's strategy and architecture for web services and Service-oriented architecture (SOA), a software design and software architecture design pattern based on distinct pieces of software providing application functionality as services to other applications. Prior to transferring to IBM SWG, he has been a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

In 2007 Ferguson left IBM to join Microsoft as a technical fellow in platforms and strategy in the office of the CTO. He remained there until March 2008 and then joined CA, Inc. as Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief Architect. In this role, he defined the direction and technical evolution for CA products, placing special emphasis on product integration and support of new technologies like business process modeling, Web service standards, and Web 2.0. He has been responsible for promoting technical excellence and further developing the company's technical community.

Ferguson chaired the Distinguished Engineer Council and has also served on CA Technologies' Executive Leadership Team, which supervised the business and technology strategies for the company as a whole. He subsequently assumed the position of CTO before joining Dell in June 2012 as VP and CTO for software.

He contributed to approximately 30 technical journal and conference publications and is the author of "Web Services Platform Architecture: SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-BPEL, WS-Reliable Messaging, and More," Prentice Hall PTR, ISBN 0-13-148874-0, March 22, 2005. Ferguson also holds more than a dozen patents.