Donald F. Ferguson, Ph.D. IBM Fellow, Member IBM Academy of Technology Chief Architect for the WebSphere Platform, Chairman of SWG Architecture Board

Dr. Ferguson is one of 55 IBM Fellows in IBM's engineering community of 160,000 technical professionals. Don is the chief architect and technical lead for IBM's SWG Architecture Board and family of products. Don's most recent efforts have focused on Web services, business process management, Grid services and application development for WebSphere. Donald Ferguson earned 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. Don joined IBM Research in 1987 and initially led research and advanced development efforts in the areas of - file system performance (Hiperbatch) - tuning database buffer pools (DB2) - goal oriented performance management and tuning of operating systems (MVS Workload Manager) and workload balancing for parallel transaction processing systems (CICSPLEX/SM) Starting in 1993, Don started focusing his efforts in the area of distributed, OO systems. This work focused on CORBA based SM solutions and frameworks, and evolved into a effort to define frameworks and system structure for CORBA based object transaction monitors. The early design and prototype of these systems produced IBM Component Broker and WebSphere Family of products. Don has earned two Corporate Award (EJB Specification, WebSphere),4 Outstanding Technical Awards and several division awards at IBM. Don was the co program committee chairman for the First International Conference on Information and Computation Economies. He received a best paper award for work on database buffer pools, has over 24 technical publications and 7 granted or pending patents. He has give approximately ten invited keynote speeches at technical conferences. Don was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 1997 and was name a Distinguished Engineer on April Fool's Day, 1998. No one is sure of the joke was on IBM or Don. Don was named an IBM Fellow on May 30, 2001.