Iris Associates

Iris Associates was a software development company founded in Littleton, Massachusetts on December 7th, 1984 by Ray Ozzie, specifically to build the software ultimately known as Lotus Notes. Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell, who joined Iris shortly thereafter in January of 1985, met Ray Ozzie years before while all were working on the University of Illinois PLATO project. Ray, Tim and Len are widely regarded as the core team behind the creation of Lotus Notes.

The company's primary funding came as the result of a contractual relationship with Lotus Development Corp., best known at the time for its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software. The basic nature of the initial relationship between Iris and Lotus was that Lotus speculatively and completely funded development of Iris' product (then code-named simply "Notes") in exchange for a future option to purchase exclusive intellectual property, marketing & sales rights. After this option was ultimately exercised years later by Lotus, Iris was additionally compensated (beyond development costs) through royalties on gross product sales. Lotus Notes was brought to market on Iris' 5th anniversary, on December 7, 1989.

The author/publisher contractual relationship between Iris Associates and Lotus Development continued for many years, until 1984 when Iris was purchased by Lotus for approximately US$84 million.

Only a year later, in the face of an apparent rapid decline of its desktop business, Lotus itself was purchased by IBM for approximately US$3.5B. Approximately US$3B of this price is generally attributed to the purchase of the Notes business. At the time of the IBM purchase, Lotus reported that Notes had approximately 2.2M users. In 2004, nearing the 20th anniversary of the founding of Iris Associates, IBM reports that Notes has over 110M users.