Iris Associates
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 1984-12-07 |
| Founder | Ray Ozzie |
| Headquarters | Westford, Massachusetts , United States |
| Products | Lotus Notes (software) |
Iris Associates was a software company based in the United States, established in 1984. It was responsible for creating the software behind Lotus Notes (which was later renamed IBM Notes). Iris operated under a contract with Lotus Development Corporation until its acquisition by Lotus in 1994.
Founding
Iris Associates came into existence in Westford, Massachusetts on December 7, 1984, with Ray Ozzie as its founder. Shortly after, in January 1985, Tim Halvorsen, Steve Beckhardt, and Len Kawell joined the team; they had previously worked alongside Ozzie on the University of Illinois PLATO system. This founding group was responsible for developing Lotus Notes. Kawell developed PDP-11 Notes and VAX Notes, earlier versions that offered similar capabilities to Lotus Notes.
Relationship with Lotus Development Corporation
The main source of Iris’s funding was a contractual agreement with Lotus Development Corporation, the company renowned for its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application. Lotus funded the development of Iris’s product (initially called "Notes") in return for exclusive future rights to its intellectual property, marketing, and sales. Upon exercising this option, Lotus paid Iris royalties calculated on total sales revenue. The official release of Lotus Notes coincided with Iris’s fifth anniversary on December 7, 1989.
This author-publisher dynamic persisted until 1994 when Lotus acquired Iris for around US$84 million.
Success of Lotus Notes
One year later, after encountering a downturn in its desktop software segment, Lotus itself was acquired by IBM for approximately US$3.5 billion, with about US$3 billion attributed to the Notes division. At the time of this acquisition, Lotus reported roughly 2.2 million users of Notes. By 2004, IBM declared that the user base had expanded to over 110 million individuals.