Ray Ozzie (25)

Ray Ozzie, founder and CEO of Groove Networks and the father of Lotus Notes, is a reluctant frontman. Perhaps that's why he's so good at it.

A reticent person who spent years happily behind the scenes building Notes, Ozzie is now the main pitchman for Groove's collaborative software platform. He is forever giving speeches.

"Now it's Ray Ozzie, Rock Star," says Jim Bernardo, a 10-year Lotus veteran who is now a product manager at Microsoft. "In the past two years, I've seen some very un-Ray-like things. At Lotus, he generally put others in front of the press. Now I see Ray in Forbes, I see Ray in Fortune, I see Ray everywhere."

Ozzie, who turns 47 this month and may be somewhat retiring, is also a natural. He not only has fame, fortune and photogenic good looks, but also a huge amount of credibility. More importantly, people just plain like him for his candor and humility. Articulate and reasonable, Ozzie has succeeded in gaining attention from the industry this year for 5-year-old Groove, which, if successful, could bring about a new wave of secure collaborative computing.

When Ozzie launched Groove as Rhythmix in 1997, it was in stealth mode. And that's where it stayed until the Groove 1.0 launch in October 2000. Ozzie and company are now hoping Groove's Web-based collaborative platform will replicate the success of Notes, which, IDC says, boasted 75 million seats last year.

Notes "was the single product that Bill Gates said he envied, and for the most part, it kept Microsoft's messaging product at bay for more than 10 years," says Mark Cuban, a former integrator and early Notes proponent who now owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. "That's amazing, and Ray deserves the accolades."

Ozzie sees important things sooner than others, says longtime friend Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc and CTO of Trellix. With Notes, Ozzie helped transform the PC from a personal device into a team tool, Bricklin says, and then, way before most adults, Ozzie saw the potential power of online interaction and application sharing by watching his son play games and chat online. "Ray caught that wave when it was really happening. He saw it at that point. We all see it now," Bricklin says.

Others agree. "Ozzie has demonstrated incredible foresight about elegant architecture. %85 Client/server was crude compared with Notes/Domino, and Web services are crude compared with Groove. He has the vision and executes on it to produce highly reliable and productive software," says Dana Gardner, an analyst at Aberdeen Group who says he uses Groove to chat and share documents and photos with his extended family.

One reason Ozzie stands apart from high-tech CEOs is he seems to understand and really think through the human aspects of his work. "There's a difference between being a business person and a tech person and then going into a third dimension with an understanding of the impact [technologies] have on people, on an organization and on processes," says Dick O'Neill, president of The Highlands Group, a Washington-based consultancy. "It's like he's part sociologist or anthropologist."

That human touch pays off close to home,in Groove's own ranks. "People %85 came to Groove before they even knew what it was or what it was doing. They want to work with him because he's engaging, intelligent and charismatic," says John Wollman, executive vice president of Alliance Consulting, an early Groove channel partner.

Paul Haverstock, the former Lotus programmer largely responsible for bringing Notes to the Web, concurs. "It comes down to the fact that he's brilliant, charismatic and has a lot of integrity. He cares about people; he's very open and honest," Haverstock says. "And that combination generates a lot of loyalty."

It is difficult to say if all the attention is paying off for Groove. The company is privately held and doesn't disclose its sales. It boasts some high-profile corporate wins, such as pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, although it is unclear how much revenue Groove generated. But it must be doing something right. Last year, Microsoft invested $51 million in the company. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer calls Ozzie "a brilliant product thinker and technical guy." From Ballmer, that's the highest praise. Some skeptics say Microsoft's involvement in Groove is risky. "Microsoft bought its way in to see what Groove is up to and will end up sucking all that up into its own offerings," one Microsoft watcher says.

Ozzie is acutely aware of that perception. Asked if collaboration technology will end up as simply a part of Microsoft Office or the Windows .Net operating system, he is sanguine. "Time will tell. In one breath, you can say communication technology belongs in the OS. In the next, you can say in the productivity suite," Ozzie says. "I know it's self-serving, but I believe there's an intermediate layer that will emerge, a distinct %85 collaboration layer. Groove is something in that space."

"He seems to view the channel in the context of supply chain and inventory turns," says Don Richie, president of Sequel Data Systems, Austin, Texas.

As such, solution providers were not particularly concerned last week when Capellas resigned his post at HP.

"When Capellas made presentations to Wall Street analysts and pushed the direct model of the new HP, as a solution provider that bothered me," says John Sheaffer, president of Sysix Technologies, Westmont, Ill.