IBM announced at Lotusphere in Orlando this week LotusLive, a cloud-based portfolio of social networking and collaboration services designed for business. LotusLive will extend customers' current investments and link to everyday business services. LotusLive.com is now the place to find all of Lotus' cloud solutions including email, collaboration, and Web conferencing services, according to IBM.

"With LotusLive, we are bringing 20 years of experience in collaboration to the cloud," said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Lotus software. "We believe our open, integrated platform will dramatically simplify and improve the way businesses interact with their partners and customers. With this offering we're taking Lotus to more people, in more places, than ever before."

LotusLive is designed to help companies work smarter by making it easy for them to connect and work together--with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. LotusLive's online services give businesses of all sizes access to Lotus' rich collaboration tools without requiring an up-front investment in IT support resources or infrastructure.

"During the open beta I've seen how an open, cloud-based community has the potential to support my organization's rapid development efficiently and effectively, while remaining centralized and manageable," said Darian Hendricks, president and executive director, Robert R. Taylor Network, Inc. "I think there are endless possibilities for building enterprise partnerships with technology that facilitates business relationships around team-based projects."

LotusLive is built using open Web-based standards and an open business model allowing it to easily integrate with third party applications. Today Lotus previewed several examples of "Click to Cloud"--the ability to seamlessly link on-premise solutions with LotusLive services. "Click to Cloud" will help customers extend the value of their existing investments by making it easy to bridge solutions inside the firewall to the cloud.

IBM also previewed compelling business partner application integration. IBM announced partnerships with Skype, LinkedIn and salesforce.com that will deliver integrated collaborative solutions to an audience of more than 400 million people worldwide.

LinkedIn, an online network of more than 34 million business professionals, announced today it intends to work with IBM to connect the LinkedIn network with LotusLive. LotusLive users will be able to search LinkedIn's public professional network and then instantly collaborate with them using LotusLive services.

Salesforce.com today demonstrated integrating LotusLive services within its CRM solutions, helping to simplify and improve customer interactions. Businesses will be able to extend the customer and opportunity management work done in the Salesforce CRM application with the collaborative capability of LotusLive.

Skype has announced plans to integrate its voice and video with LotusLive to create a seamless communications experience. This integration will allow LotusLive customers to conveniently call Skype contacts from within their LotusLive contacts.

Learn more about the LotusLive portfolio at: http://www.lotuslive.com/.