I am a new Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
I am also an IBM Fellow (IBM Fellow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,
IBM Fellows). There are approximately 55 Fellows in IBM's technical
community of 200,000 professionals. There have been about 160 Fellows
in IBM's history.I am the Chief Architect for IBM's Software Group (SWG), which is the
second largest software company in the world (after Microsoft). SWG
specializes in middleware that support applications for small, medium
and large enterprises.My primary hobby is Kenpo Karate. I received my black belt in December 2005.
I have started studying Ju-Jitsu. I also enjoy soccer.Bio
Donald F. Ferguson is one of 55 active IBM Fellows, IBM’s highest technical position, in IBM's engineering community of 200,000 technical professionals. There have been approximately 200 Fellows in IBM’s history.Don is the Chief Architect and technical lead for IBM's Software Group (SWG) family of products, and chairs the SWG Architecture Board. This board includes the chief architects for DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli and WebSphere products.Don's most recent efforts have focused on • Web services implementation in IBM products, and the definition of standards. • Simplified application development and tools, and support for patterns, templates and recipes. • SWG product support for information integration, content management, application integration and event management • Scalability and high availability • Business process management • Grid services • Client, mobile and embedded platforms • Componentization and integration of the SWG product family • Portal and Web service based approaches to systems and application management.Don was the Chief Architect for the WebSphere family of products from its inception in 1998 until assuming the role of SWG Chief Architect in 2003. Don was the Chief Architect for the Component Broker product, which was a precursor to 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 and caching • Autonomic, goal oriented tuning of database buffer pools (DB2), for which his co-authors and he received a best paper award. • Autonomic, goal oriented performance management and tuning of operating systems (MVS Workload Manager) • Autonomic, goal oriented 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 an 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 the 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 andComputation Economies. He received a best paper award for work on database buffer pools, has
over 24 technical publications and a dozen granted or pending patents. He has given approximately fifteen invited keynote speeches at technical conferences. He is also a co-author of the book Web Services Platform Architecture.
Don was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 1997 and was named 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.
