In 1999, Ferris was invited to work with
OASIS (organization) on the problem of B2B transactions, launching his open-source career development. In the early days of the
internet, vendor-specific and proprietary
Electronic Data Interchange or EDI systems were proving “clunky” (slow to deploy and hard to maintain), and needed to be revised and opened up to encourage much faster adoption rates. As a Chief Architect of
Sun Microsystems IT, he was invited to the first and second meetings of the
OASIS (organization) working group looking into
ebXML (Electronic Business Markup Language) for
ERP (Enterprise Resource Management) and
B2B (Business to Business) transactions, such as invoices, purchasing, payment transactions. The
United Nations adopted this work as the foundational international standard around global commerce, see
UN/CEFACT. Ferris became vice chair of the OASIS working group on
messaging. This work lead to
SOAP replacing or underlying vendor-specific proprietary messaging systems, and led to the development of
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) developed by a working group at the
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Ferris then became chair of
web service architecture working group at the W3C. In the fall of 2002, Ferris joined IBM, and later became an IBM Distinguished Engineer. Ferris has also provided technical oversight and leadership in OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Cloud Native Compute Foundation, Open Container Initiative, Mesos and Docker., == Linux Foundation Hyperledger ==