Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

Ray Ozzie belongs to a coterie of technology superstars that are credited with creating some of the watershed developments in software - a group that includes James Gosling (the Java programming language), Marc Andreessen (the web browser) and Linus Torvalds (the Linux operating system).

Ozzie's contribution - he created the Lotus Notes groupware package - may be generally less well known, but in software circles he is lauded as the godfather of collaboration software, the founder of a market currently worth around $4.4 billion. Though fiercely independent of big business trappings, Ozzie has never been shy to take mainstream corporate money to fuel his dreams - he developed Notes first with Lotus input, then with IBM's cash, before going on to create a next-generation product through his start-up Groove Networks, funded by Microsoft and Intel among others. In March 2005, however, after twenty-five years shunning the corporate corridors, Ozzie sold Groove to Microsoft (for an undisclosed sum) and accepted a powerful role within the company whose technology he once mocked, as one of its three chief technology officers.

It is a move that some die-hard fans are finding hard to stomach. And, indeed, Ozzie's tastes may seem maverick in Redmond: he has been an open advocate of Microsoft's would-be nemesis, open source software, a keen user of the Skype Internet-based phone service, and his role in making Notes a thorn in Microsoft's side for many years is applauded by an army of self-confessed Lotus geeks.

Ozzie traces his passion for the use of technology to enhance interactive working back to the late-1970s, when, as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, he worked on PLATO Group Notes - an automated teaching system that interconnected 1,000 terminals via a central mainframe.

"[Using PLATO], I established relationships with people I never actually met face-to-face," recalls Ozzie. "Since then, in many ways, I've spent most of my life trying to build on those first experiences." In the mid-1980s, Ozzie worked independently to develop a PC-based expansion of the PLATO concept, eventually obtaining funding for his company, Iris Associates, from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and licensing the emerging Notes product to Lotus.

A decade later and two years after IBM bought Lotus, Ozzie left to form Groove Networks and exploit the notion of peer-to-peer architectures (P2P) as the basis for a next-generation of collaboration software. Like the networks used to download music, P2P systems create a direct, server-less interaction environment between users' workstations. Groove grew out of frustration with the lengthy deployment timeframes and the client/server-based, centralised architecture of Notes and from Ozzie's need to stay true to his vision of truly productive, cross-domain collaborative software.

Fuelled by himself, venture capital and a $51 million investment from Microsoft, Ozzie led the development of Groove Virtual Office, a suite that enabled secure, Internet-based interaction.

Ozzie believed - and still does - in a simple triad of primary tools needed for effective collaboration: email, a browser and a technology platform such as Groove's. But one aspect of the modern software world prompted him to accept Microsoft's courtship - that companies don't bet their business on start-ups. "While [Groove] has worked incredibly hard and achieved some amazing milestones, we haven't been able to fulfill that original vision as a small, independent company," says Ozzie. "Now we might."

Microsoft needed Groove just as much. "We've discovered that collaboration technology is fairly tough to get right," admits Jeff Raikes, Microsoft group VP of Information Worker Business. Hailing Groove as the missing link in Microsoft's collaboration portfolio, Bill Gates promised that the technology will be applied across a broad range of Microsoft offerings, most importantly, its SharePoint product, which many analysts believe has lacked clout in the collaboration market.

Speaking at IBM's Lotusphere conference in January, Ozzie hinted that the Groove technology released so far is only the tip of the iceberg: "I really believe we've only just begun to explore how technology can improve how we work together and how it can help co-ordinate our activities when we're apart."