Name: Ray Ozzie
Company: Microsoft
Job Title: Chief Technical Officer
Bio: Ray Ozzie, the creator of IBM Corp.’s Lotus Notes, is an industry visionary and pioneer in computer-supported cooperative work. As a chief technical officer of Microsoft Corp., Ozzie reports to Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates. In this role, Ozzie has responsibility for influencing corporate communications and collaboration strategy, applications and platform infrastructure, and for helping drive Microsoft's software-based services strategy and execution across all three of the company's divisions. Ozzie is the founder of Groove Networks Inc., a leading provider of collaboration software for the virtual office, which Microsoft acquired in April 2005. Ozzie continues to be involved with future development of the Groove technologies as part of Microsoft’s Information Worker Group.
Before founding Groove Networks in October 1997, Ozzie was the founder and president of Iris Associates Inc. There he created and led the initial development of Lotus Notes. Before Iris, Ozzie was instrumental in the development of Lotus Symphony and Software Arts Inc.’s TK!Solver and VisiCalc, and was involved in early distributed operating systems development at Data General Corp.
Ozzie earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and has been honored as a distinguished alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was first exposed to the nature and significance of collaborative systems and computer-supported cooperative work. This significantly influenced his perspective on collaborative systems and the projects he has undertaken throughout his career.
Ozzie is honored as one of seven Windows® Pioneers by Microsoft, was named Person of the Year in 1995 by PC Magazine, and was inducted into the Computer Museum Industry Hall of Fame as well as the InfoWorld Hall of Fame. In November 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. Ozzie is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and was honored as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2001.