I’m at Lotusphere this week.   I’ll be blogging on key announcements and visionary thoughts.  One of the first key announcements is Lotus’ recent announcement that Panasonic chose their email to LotusLive.  They decided to go to the cloud for email and potentially social collaboration services.   I don’t know much about the deal other than the large size with 380,000 users and the intent to use email, instant messaging, and a host of social networking services.  I do know that the cloud isn’t going away and IBM is starting to get their solutions on the cloud.

Here’s the press release:

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.  Panasonic will present more details at IBM’s annual Lotusphere Conference January 17 – 21 in Orlando, Florida.

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.”

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