Dr. Donald F. Ferguson is executive vice president and chief technology officer at CA, responsible for delivering common technology services to CA’s business units, ensuring architectural compliance and integration of the company's solutions and products. Tasked with promoting technical excellence at CA and further developing the company’s technical community, Don chairs the CA Architecture Board and a newly formed Distinguished Engineer Board. He also serves on CA’s Executive Leadership Team, which supervises the business and technology strategies for the company as a whole.
Before assuming the position of CTO, Don was corporate senior vice president and chief architect. In this role, he defined the direction and technical evolution for CA products. Don placed special emphasis on product integration and support of new technologies like business process modeling, Web service standards and Web 2.0.
Prior to joining CA in 2008, Don was a Microsoft Technical Fellow working in the Office of the CTO. He worked on various projects exploring the future of enterprise software, with a special emphasis on Web services and Internet application platforms.
Don began his career at IBM, where he worked for twenty years. In 2001 Don became an IBM Fellow, IBM's highest technical honor. IBM has approximately 50 IBM Fellows in the 150,000 person engineering team.
Earlier, he served as chief architect for the IBM Software Group, where he focused on design issues and initiatives spanning the DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli, Lotus and Rational product families. During this time, Ferguson also worked on a number of SOA and Web service initiatives, specifications and standards. Don also held the title of chief architect for the WebSphere product family from its inception until becoming IBM Software Group chief architect.
Don earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Columbia University. He has contributed to approximately 30 technical journal and conference publications, and has more than a dozen patents.