Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie is the CEO and founder of Blues Wireless which was founded in 2018 to tackle the broad technical and business issues in telecommunications he experienced while working with Safecast, a nonprofit global environmental monitoring effort organized in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Blues Wireless develops integrated hardware, software, and services that make it possible for any developer and every device to easily, securely, and inexpensively take advantage of the global cellular infrastructure – for business, and for good.

Ray has long been a pioneer in the areas of communications infrastructure and collaborative productivity. Through late 2010, he served as CTO and chief software architect of Microsoft, a role that he assumed following its acquisition of Groove Networks - a company Ray founded to develop software for end-to-end secure mobile business team collaboration.

Prior to Groove, Ray was founder and CEO of Iris Associates, the creator and developer of Lotus Notes which was ultimately acquired by Lotus and IBM. Under his leadership, Lotus Notes grew to be used for e-Mail and low-code collaborative applications by hundreds of millions at most major enterprises worldwide.

More recently, he founded and served as CEO of Talko, a developer of voice-centric mobile apps and services for business team communications. Talko was purchased by Microsoft in late 2015.

Ray has received numerous industry honors for his work, including IEEE’s W. Wallace McDowell Award. In 2004, Ray was inducted as a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2010, he was named as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

He currently serves as a director of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Safecast, and Balena. Previously, he served on the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and as a director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).