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With a new office in Japan and projections for $10 million in sales, Ives Development is doing very well, thank you. Headquartered in Beverly, Mass., and with an office in the United Kingdom, Ives Development is branching out again, this time to Yokohama, Japan, where it recently opened a three-person office. "When we found out the size of the Japanese market for Notes, we thought it would be stupid to ignore it," said CEO Nigel Cheshire, who estimates that about 20 percent of NotesÌ installed base is in Japan. Ives Development is best known for its TeamStudio Design System, an integrated suite of software engineering tools and training for Notes and Domino. The suite, whose components (see the sidebar on opposite page for details), costs $2,855 per user. Ives also sells two other products: TeamStudio LifeCycle, a Web-based training course, and R5 Migration Pro, which facilitates migration from Notes R4 to R5. The firm was established in 1995 as a subsidiary of what was then called Ives & Company, a U.K.-based Notes consultancy cofounded by Cheshire and Steve Ives. Ives is a board director and
major shareholder in Ives Development but doesnÌt participate in the companyÌs daily operations, and the two outfits split up about eight months ago (Ives & Company is now called Aspective).
"Ives Development is sort of my baby," said the 40-year-old Cheshire. For the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2000, Ives did $6.5 million in sales, and Cheshire anticipates $10 million in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2001. His
long-term financial goals for the company are much loftier: "Over the coming months weÌll be mapping out a path that takes us from $10 to $100 million, and it will not be through purely organic growth. The
landscape in the Lotus business partner world is changing. To be successful long-term, you need to map out a credible plan that shows how you would get from $10 million to $100 million. Right now, we are in
the process of putting that plan together." TeamStudio PartnerSourceA hundred million dollars is a long way off, of course, but Ives Development took a small step toward that goal this summer, when it launched the TeamStudio PartnerSource program to market and sell third-party Notes and Domino products through www.teamstudio.com and other channels. "There are a lot of teeny-tiny little companies operating in this market who have really neat little products, but they donÌt really have any cost-effective means of getting them to market," explained Cheshire. "PartnerSource is an opportunity for companies which have products that address the needs of Domino and Notes developers to really tap into the investment weÌve made in this channel and allow us to remarket and resell their products for them." The programÌs first participant is the Tactica Technology Group of Dallas, Tex., which developed R5 Migration Pro. A consultancy, Tactica had "no means or particular inclination to take that product to market," said Cheshire, so it turned to Ives Development. "So far, this partnership has been extremely successful. We took the product, we helped them to productize itÛto get it to the point where it could be sold in a shrink-wrapped formÛand then we produced all our usual marketing collateral on our Web site for it and through our telemarketing channel as well." A combination of databases, checklists, and other components, R5 Migration Pro costs $695 per site license. Cheshire expects several other companies to enter the PartnerSource program over the coming months, and he eventually hopes to offer a new family of products every quarter. Ives Development intends to sell PartnerSource products in all of its marketsÛthe United States, Europe, and especially Japan. But to be successful in Japan, Cheshire said, a vendor canÌt merely sell the English version of its product; it has to translate the product into Japanese, as Ives Development did earlier this year with the TeamStudio Design System. "We looked carefully at how Lotus translated Notes and especially Domino Designer for the Japanese model, and we used the same terms and level of translation. We expected that Lotus would not have translated some of the very detailed technical terms. In fact, they have, and so we followed the same model."
The Future
Looking ahead, Cheshire expects continued consolidation in the Notes and Domino market. "Lotus is becoming more IBM-like. The business partner model is shifting from one where Lotus is happy to
have 18,000 different companies as business partners to one where theyÌre going to be looking for a much smaller number of much larger organizations as business partners." While "there will undoubtedly be some diversification on our part," Cheshire declined to say whether Ives would acquire other companiesÛor whether it
intended to be acquired. In the short term, Ives plans to continue releasing new and improved versions of the TeamStudio Design System. "Aside from that," he said, "I think weÌre going to
release more of these third-party products to the point where teamstudio.com becomes the place to go if youÌre looking for tools for Notes developers."
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