Ray Ozzie on 9-11 Commission Report IT Implications.
Another interview with Ray Ozzie that may be of interest: T.C. Doyle of VARBusiness magazine recently interviewed Ray on what implications the 9-11 Commission report has for value-added resellers, systems integrators and other IT specialists.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
Ozzie
makes the case that all of this has relevance to you because its
underscores the need for more decentralized systems as potential
solutions to many of our macro IT problems. They protect people's
privacy, for one thing. They are less prone to failure, for another.
And they guarantee that those using disparate systems do not get left
out in the cold. But decentralized solutions usher in new requirements
for authentication, data flow, security, etc.
“The
reason this is highly relevant to us is that since 9-11, we have been
increasingly selling Groove as a commercial, off-the shelf system for
doing exactly this kind of thing for the same reasons that the Markle
Report says that this architecture is a good architecture,” Ozzie says.
He notes that 40 percent of his company's revenue comes
from the government sector and intelligence community. Ozzie never
figured that some of his biggest customers would be defense department
types; he started the company with the hopes of helping enterprise
customers solve cross-enterprise commercial issues. But after 9-11,
various agencies starting with DARPA have expressed interest in his
company's product portfolio.
Now, seven years after
the birth of Groove, the company finally has the momentum it always
promised to achieve. More VARs and solution providers are signing on to
sell Virtual Office 3.0, the first product from the company that has
broad appeal for customers ranging in size from just a few employees to
a customer the size of the U.S. Army [Groove.net Weblog]