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Ray Ozzie
Notes inventor envisions peer-to-peer technology supplanting e-mail
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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.
After three years and 3 million lines of code, Groove
Networks, which was run like a stealth project that
would make the CIA envious, debuted in October 2000
and ever since has shone a white-hot spotlight on
what p-to-p technologies can do to solve serious
business problems.
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.
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Dave Moellenhoff - ASP founder predicts the end of software as we know it
Larry Page and Sergey Brin - The Internet's most famous pair of Ph.D.s are still striving to make data more accessible
Clifford Neuman - For Kerberos co-author, security hasn't lost its allure
Ray Ozzie - Notes inventor envisions peer-to-peer technology supplanting e-mail
Vivek Ranadivé - Real-time computing pioneer is taking his message to the enterprise masses
Dave Winer - SOAP co-author strives for simplicity and drives decentralization
Mark Lucovsky - The brains behind HailStorm sees Web services as a hub for simplifying busy lives
Back to 2002 Technology Innovators
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Profile |
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| Ray Ozzie - The Pioneer of e-mail for business believes he has found a better way to collaborate. |
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Current position - Chairman, CEO, Goove Networks |
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Age - 46 |
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Technology prediction - "If we continue on the current trajectory, e-mail will
become the place where you receive stuff from people you don't know,
and Groove and other collaborative environments will be where you work
with people you know." |
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Related Links |
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Hall of fame 2002 - Several industry icons join InfoWorld's Innovators Hall of Fame |
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Ones to Watch 2002 - These up-and-comers are developing the technologies that will matter most in the coming months |
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Where are they now? - Since the 2000 Ones to Watch were named, many dot-coms imploded and the economy
soured. How have these technological talents fared? |
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