Ray Ozzie

Biography
Ray Ozzie founded Groove Networks in October 1997. Previously, Ray was a founder and president of Iris Associates, where he created and led the development of Lotus Notes, the defining groupware product used by more than 100 million people worldwide.

Prior to Iris, Ray was instrumental in the development of Lotus Symphony and Software Arts’ TK!Solver and VisiCalc, and did early distributed operating systems development at Data General Corp.

Ray earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and has been honored as a distinguished alumnus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was first exposed to the nature and significance of collaborative systems and computer-supported cooperative work while working on the university’s seminal PLATO project. This work significantly influenced his perspective on collaborative systems and the projects he has undertaken throughout his career.

Honored as one of seven “Windows Pioneers” by Microsoft, Ray was named “Person of the Year” in 1995 by PC Magazine, and was cited as one of the “top five developers of the century” in an online poll conducted by Computer Reseller News. Ray has been inducted into the Computer Museum Industry Hall of Fame and the InfoWorld Hall of Fame, and in November of 2000, he received the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society’s W. Wallace McDowell Award. He has served as a member of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and was a member of the NRC committee that produced the landmark CRISIS report on the societal impact of cryptography, a computer security technology.

Ray is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a World Economic Forum member and governor for IT & telecommunications. He was honored as World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2001.

Ray Ozzie’s personal weblog may be found at http://www.ozzie.net/blog.

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