OpenIRIS: from one institute's system to software used across Europe

The challenge

The Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel struggled to find a development company that could complete its software projects. It needed a system for its shared research equipment: who can book which instrument, when, under what rules, and who pays for it.

What we did

We sat down with FMI, listened to what the institute needed and advised on how to set up a remote development team. That team built OpenIRIS, and we have developed and supported it ever since.

OpenIRIS handles the whole life of a booking at a research facility: who has access and what training they need, rules on how far ahead and for how long people can book, service requests for work a facility does on a researcher’s behalf, penalties for no-shows, and the charges that go to each research group’s cost centre. Each institution configures it for its own facilities, prices and approval processes, and its users sign in through their own institution’s login.

Keeping it running while it grows

A system that hundreds of facilities rely on every day cannot be stopped for a rebuild. The team works in weekly sprints, an automated test suite runs every night, and errors and performance in production are monitored.

The original application is an ASP.NET MVC system on SQL Server. We are moving it to a new ASP.NET Core API one feature at a time, with the old and new parts sharing the same database and sign-in, so the institutions using it see steady improvement rather than a disruptive switch. It is the same staged approach we take when modernising older business systems for other clients.

The result

OpenIRIS has been in continuous service since 2014. In the 12 months to October 2026 it handled more than 690,000 bookings by more than 20,000 researchers, across over 550 research facilities and more than 6,000 instruments and services.

The institutions using it include Institut Curie, the Paris Brain Institute (ICM), Aix-Marseille University, Gustave Roussy and Sorbonne Université in France; Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the Max Delbrück Center, Freie Universität Berlin, the Berlin Institute of Health, the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, TU Darmstadt, Helmholtz Munich and the Institute of Molecular Biology in Germany; the Universities of Basel, Bern and Fribourg and ETH Zurich in Switzerland; the Universities of Helsinki and Turku in Finland; and the Medical University of Graz in Austria.

FMI’s Head of Informatics has reviewed the work on Clutch, where it is rated 5.0 out of 5.