Company type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Computer software |
Founded | 1982 | (as Lotus Development Corporation)
Headquarters | Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Products | Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus Agenda Lotus Connections Lotus Domino Lotus Domino Web Access Lotus Expeditor Lotus Forms Lotus Freelance Graphics Lotus Magellan Lotus Manuscript Lotus Notes Lotus Notes Traveler Lotus Quickr Lotus Sametime Lotus SmartSuite Lotus Symphony LotusWorks[1] Lotus Foundations IBM Lotus Web Content Management |
Parent | HCL |
Website | Official website |
Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM)[2] was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018.
Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable, and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become widely available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no graphical user interface. Much later, in conjunction with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, Lotus also released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes. IBM purchased the company in 1995 for US$3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important client–server computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products such as IBM's OfficeVision obsolete.[3]
On December 6, 2018, IBM announced the sale of Lotus Software/Domino to HCL for $1.8 billion.[4]