Foundation
NIP was founded in 1989 by 2 ex-Hewlett Packard employees, Chris Vallé and Robert Davis, who remain NIP's directors. Despite 10 successful years at HP, Chris and Robert were concerned that the company did not, at that time, see the long-term value of managing unstructured information (text, images, etc) for competitive intelligence, marketing and other purposes.

Since the advent of the web, this idea has become widely-accepted, but it was revolutionary at the end of the 1980s. Having failed to convince them of its value, Chris and Robert therefore decided to leave HP and found NIP.

The first example of this new class of applications was Information Partner, introduced late in 1990. This was a PC LAN-based tool that captured, tagged and organised information from predominantly subscription-based information sources, and it went on to win a prestigious internal BP innovation award in 1992.

Lotus Notes
In late 1992, NIP was asked to build a large marketing intelligence system for SmithKline Beecham, using the soon-to-be-launched Lotus Notes, Release 3.0. After this introduction to the technology, it became clear that Notes was an ideal tool for NIP's goals.

NIP became a leading technically-focussed Notes development company, joined the fledgling Business Partner programme in 1993, and became a Premium Partner in 1994. 1994 also saw the development of two highly-significant systems:

• A complex Competitive Intelligence System for Roche Pharmaceuticals, deployed across Europe, North America and Japan, involving innovative workflow and user interface, and our first experience of developing and deploying a global solution
• The first version of MedInfoSys®, which has become our most long-lived solution

In 1995, it became clear that the emerging Internet (see below) would dramatically impact the management of unstructured data, but Notes remained a strategic focus for developing what were becoming known as "knowledge management applications".

NIP's 1996 re-write of the FT.com site and the automation of the London Stock Exchange's UK Listings process were both built in Notes. (The latter went live early in 1998 and later won an Economist publication "Knowledge Capture & Access Award".) 1996 also saw NIP begin work on the Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN). Customers included Kodak (global rollout in 1998) and DuPont (US rollout 2000).

We are still supporting legacy systems and developing new databases in Notes in 2007.

The Internet
NIP began developing web-based solutions back in 1995. Initially, these used Lotus Notes as the underlying tool, but alternative development platforms were soon explored (e.g. Perl/Mason, Zope, Python).

Applications included:

• A worldwide organic crop management system in 1999
• A content management system for Screen Digest in 2000
• Fulcrum in 2000, for a cargo risk management company - Cargo Solutions - to manage their risk assessment and management business
• A food industry data exchange for EUREP in 2001
• Upgrades of MedInfoSys® and MA Centre (formally Register!) for e.g. AstraZeneca
• The Contracts Register System (for London Boroughs) in 2005
• Matrix evaluation systems to support PAS11000 in 2006

Our focus in recent years has been on developing a core set of tools to encapsulate all that we have learned about general business problems and how to solve them. Regardless of industry-specific detail, the deeper underlying patterns and problems are the same. These tools can be quickly applied and configured in any industry to exploit the collaborative and information-sharing power of the Internet.

We retain Notes expertise in house, and much of our Notes experience and learning is expressed in our web-based applications.