Way back in early 1997 we were lucky enough to get a Lotus Beacon Award and it was presented by Ray Ozzie. `These are the equivalent of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Awards. It was the heady days of the company start. Lotus Notes was king. SharePoint had not been invented. We still have the picture hanging in the office of Ray presenting the award.

Ray ended up at Microsoft as one of the two CTO's - and Ray drove the "software as a service" or "cloud" agenda at Microsoft. The start of Ray's term was noted with an internal email he wrote to Microsoft that got sent around the world - now known as Ray’s Internet Services Disruption memo. This was about 5 years ago.

More recently Ray announced that he will leave Microsoft but as he departed he left another seminal email for the Microsoft team called the Dawn of a New Day. Well worth a read as we end one year and start another.