Ray, I never knew you but thanks...

Ray Noorda passed away a couple of days ago. I never me him but I sure knew of him and many friends of mine worked with Ray in the beginning days of Novell. I've had a number of momentous intersections where his influence affected me...

#1 - I started a new job in 1989 at IDRC and my first task was to evaluate LAN technology from Novell, 3COM and Banyan and make a recommendation on what we should buy - we went with Banyan VINES - but that's when I first really started to get into what Novell was about. To this day Novell still gets directories and how a directory can be an enabling force. More so than any other vendor out there.

#2 - When I was with Zoomit in the mid-'90s we ported our Banyan VINES products over to Novell's UnixWare, sold three copies of our fledgling pre-cursor to our metadirectory product and promptly had the rug pulled out from under us when Novell sold off UnixWare. It was Craig Burton - a Ray Noorda disciple - who told us in 1997 that we had to build our metadirectory product (Zoomit VIA) on Microsoft. Of course, that ended up leading Microsoft to acquire us in 1999. Kim Cameron, my old friend and our VP, Technology at Zoomit is still an architect at Microsoft running the identity show and working hard on InfoCard/CardSpace.

#3 - When I left Microsoft in Feb, 2005 I joined a small company based in Utah called Vintela. They were backed by Canopy Ventures which Mr. Noorda founded. Vintela was acquired by Quest Software in July, 2005.

Even though I never met Mr. Noorda my life has been influenced by him.

Thanks, Ray.

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