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GCN Home > 04/24/06 issue

Ray Ozzie | Behind Microsoft’s Groove-iness

Interview with Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks

By Brad Grimes, GCN Staff

Little more than a year ago, something happened that used to happen frequently in IT: Microsoft Corp. snapped up a promising company. But Groove Networks Inc. was more than just a collaboration software developer; it was increasingly well known for its government deployments, including data-sharing projects at the Defense and Homeland Security departments.

Ray Ozzie founded Groove Networks years after developing the successful groupware program Lotus Notes. Now he’s a chief technology officer at Microsoft, overseeing the company’s push into software as a service and Windows Live. Groove itself has become part of the Microsoft Office group. Was it a shotgun wedding? Actually, Ozzie was recognized by Microsoft as a Windows pioneer years ago, and today, he says, Groove is doing better than ever.

GCN: Microsoft sounds like it’s doing everything it can to lure all remaining Lotus Notes users to Exchange. How does that make you feel?

Ozzie: Although I’ve got very warm feelings for the product, the team that built it, the partners who built businesses around it, and the customers invested in it, Notes was designed at its core for an earlier era. Today there is a far greater set of choices, and in some cases, a far more appropriate set of choices.

Notes was designed for the world of the early ’90s—a “re-engineering the corporation” era where the mandate was to utilize technology to share information across departments within an enterprise or government organization.

In this era, before application servers and the Web, people used Notes as a Swiss Army knife of sorts to build applications of all shapes and sizes.

Fast forward to today: There is tremendous choice in powerful collaborative application development technology, and the information-sharing mandate has moved outside the walls of the enterprise.

No organization is an island; we all need to interact and interoperate in a mesh. People work together across organizations; business processes span organization boundaries.

More news on related topics: Software Applications, Web Strategies



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