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 NEWSTop ten technology innovators: Ray Ozzie By Ed Scannell February 27, 2002 1:01 pm PT  STARTING FOUR YEARS ago with only a whiteboard, a card table, and a firm resolve to address a thorny business problem, Notes inventor Ray Ozzie and a small, hand-picked development team crafted the first decentralized collaborative product based on peer-to-peer technology.
The Groove development environment and its growing number of applications and Web services have made steady progress in winning the hearts and wallets of larger IT shops. But perhaps the technology's biggest win was the deal Groove Networks struck with Microsoft last fall, which signified its strategic importance to the software giant and guaranteed that p-to-p computing, in some measure, would influence the direction of corporate computing. The first development seeds for Groove were sown as far back as 1996 when Ozzie was still at Lotus. He began to see a dramatic shift in the way customers were using Notes to solve business problems, particularly when dealing with business partners outside the company. "When we first shipped Notes in the early 1990s, people mostly used it to streamline business processes and to collaborate inside the enterprise. But then suddenly we noticed people using it outside the enterprise with companies they were dealing with for things like outsourcing," Ozzie says. As most corporate IT shops and their business partners followed suit, their IT departments began to haggle about who should be responsible for building and managing the applications and who would handle their security. This grappling for control created long delays in deploying Notes. "These sorts of problems led me to believe that an increasingly decentralized business environment fundamentally needs a decentralized technology," Ozzie says. With this goal in mind, Ozzie left Lotus in late 1997, "pressed the Rest button," and set about reinventing the technology behind Notes to develop what would become Groove. In early 1998 Ozzie and his team, which included his brother Jack and former Iris associates Eric Patey and Ken Moore, began solving some formidable technical problems centering around security, communications, and transaction management. Surrounded by this team he describes as "extremely good architects and engineers," Ozzie's primary role was that of chief architect. "Unlike Notes, where I wrote a lot of code, on Groove I did a ton of design and architectural work," Ozzie says. Given the increasing threats posed by terrorists groups, garden-variety hackers, and the lesser but still annoying problem of spam, Ozzie believes p-to-p technologies such as Groove's will prosper well into the future. "It is getting increasingly difficult to work in e-mail-oriented environments. Over time enterprise administrators are going to clamp down by intentionally introducing delays and scanning [e-mails] more deeply to uncover threats. My hope for Groove is that people will realize it is a better way of working directly and collaboratively with people on the outside and that it is 10 times more effective than e-mail," Ozzie says. According to Ozzie, decentralized collaboration will be the standard way users conduct business relationships, to the point that they only use e-mail as a place to receive communications from people they do not know. Return to our 2002 Innovators package.  Profile
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