Panasonic Corp. has ushered in the cloud computing era by adopting IBM LotusLive's suite of collaboration services.

The new services will allow its workforce to communicate and collaborate more efficiently with its global network of customers, partners and suppliers through a cloud-based community. 

Panasonic will adopt IBM's LotusLive.com services for Web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging and project management. The company will also implement LotusLive Connections for business social networking between employees, partners and suppliers to find and share the right insight when needed. As part of this investment in open IBM technology, Panasonic will migrate employees from Microsoft Exchange or other collaboration software to LotusLive for email, calendaring and contact management.

The global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012, according to IBM based on various market estimates. 

Panasonic has made a strategic decision to unify its brands worldwide under the Panasonic name. As part of its globalization efforts, the company embarked on an information technology (IT) initiative to improve competitive advantage and overall business results by helping its multiple business units work together more efficiently. 

Panasonic selected IBM for its global email and collaboration platform to help them transform their workforce into a globally connected and integrated team. Due to the open architecture of LotusLive, Panasonic can build on its existing and future investments in their IT infrastructure, without increasing the resources of their IT departments. 

"LotusLive is an integral vehicle for our employees to truly function as a globally integrated enterprise," said Mitsuhiro Aoyama, Vice President Corporate Information Systems Company, Panasonic Corporation . "It will allow us to work securely with our extended enterprise of Panasonic partners and customers as if they are all in the same location, bringing the promise of quicker, more efficient teamwork and commerce worldwide." 

"Panasonic would only make this strategic move with the assurance that their daily business workflow will be safeguarded from costly interruptions and intrusions as millions of existing LotusLive users know," said Sean Poulley, Vice President, IBM Cloud Collaboration. "When responsible businesses such as Panasonic move to the cloud, they want innovative technologies without compromising security, reliability or privacy. That's why they choose IBM." 

Companies of All Sizes Log onto LotusLive  

Companies of all sizes, including small and medium businesses (SMBs) are migrating to the cloud with LotusLive's collaboration services. Trajkovski & Partners Consulting, a management consulting firm in Skopje, Macedonia, is using LotusLive to help grow its business and support its remote clients throughout Europe. Since adopting LotusLive, the company has lowered its travel and telecommunications costs by more than 20 percent. 

"LotusLive's cloud computing services has allowed us to benefit from a highly sophisticated technology without actually investing in the infrastructure and maintenance of that solution," says Jasmina Trajkovski, Executive Manager. "LotusLive Engage eases communication with my clients because our employees no longer have to send large attachments through email and then worry about whether they were received. By working with IBM, we now have the ability to share, store and manage documents and access them at the same time as our clients. This has actually made my job easier." 

In the UK, Collaboration Matters Limited, a social software consultancy, works with a number of vendors and recommends the right tool for the job for each individual client. Stuart McIntyre, Collaborations Matters' Technical Director, has been using LotusLive Engage to host meetings, share files and perform simple project management within his company and ... beyond. "We have estimated savings of about 20 percent on the cost for a travel, while improving worlkflow with our clients. These improvements can have a massive impact on shortening project cycles, saving as many as 10 days on an eight week project." 

For Netherlands-based RealConnections, a small business focused on bringing online communities together, LotusLive is drastically reducing bottom-line costs. By using LotusLive's cloud-based services they are working more efficiently and also providing their clients with a level of trust and security that is associated with the IBM name. 

"Working with LotusLive we're saving as much as 30 minutes a day in gained productivity. This time savings equals 10 hours a month, or 120 hours per year. That is a huge savings for us," said Erik Vos, President. The good thing about LotusLive is that it brings core collaboration services together in one place. So all my contacts are there, all my files are there, all my activities are there. And then there's that extra level of trust that IBM is the hosting environment." 

Global Language Support 

IBM has also extended its LotusLive Cloud collaboration service with the availability and free trial of LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Spanish. 

The additional language support for the LotusLive portfolio follows the recent announcement of the availability of LotusLive iNotes, IBM's email service that delivers the benefits of cloud computing with a focus on reliability, privacy and security, to millions of mainstream business users for $3 per user, per month. 

LotusLive provides integrated email, collaboration and social networking services to simplify and improve daily business interactions with customers, partners and colleagues. A no-cost, 30-day trial of LotusLive is available at www.lotuslive.com/compare.