Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie is a software architect and entrepreneur whose career spans some of the most significant collaborative technologies of the personal computing era. Beginning his career at Data General, he went on to found Iris Associates in 1984, where he created Lotus Notes, one of the first commercially successful groupware applications, which integrated email, messaging, and collaborative workspace functionality into a single platform. Lotus Development Corporation acquired Iris in 1994, and Ozzie later founded Groove Networks before joining Microsoft in 2005. There, he served as Chief Technical Officer and then Chief Software Architect, the position previously held by Bill Gates, playing a central role in advancing the company's early cloud computing strategy. His career traces an arc through nearly every major phase of Boston's software industry, from the minicomputer era at Data General through the Lotus years to the cloud computing transition.