In a new marker for outsourced IT  services, Panasonic has announced it will adopt IBM's LotusLive suite of collaboration technologies. This is reportedly the largest cloud -computing arrangement ever, involving support for 100,000 Panasonic workers that will eventually expand to more than 300,000 users, including partners and suppliers.
Mitsuhiro Aoyama, vice president of corporate information systems at Panasonic, said the deal will allow the company's employees "to truly function as a globally integrated enterprise" so everyone can work "as if they were in the same location." The terms of the agreement were not released.
'Strategic Right-Sourcing'
Panasonic said the move allows it to increase its IT infrastructure without increasing its internal IT departments as it builds on a decision to unify its brands worldwide under the Panasonic name. The hosted LotusLive suite includes e-mail, conferencing, chat and file sharing.
James Staten, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester, said the deal is more significant as an example of "mix-and-match outsourcing," rather than for its cloud-computing aspect.
He said Forrester is describing this trend as "strategic right-sourcing," in which IT heads will outsource only the services they need when they realize they do not have enough internal resources.
"The old way," he said, "would have been to hand the IT keys to a company" such as IBM, but now IT departments are being "much more selective" and are becoming more open to using hosted solutions. An enterprise can give e-mail to IBM as Panasonic is doing, he said, web operations to someone else, and so on.
In Panasonic's case, Staten noted, handing e-mail to IBM is easier because the company is "already a Lotus shop."
Day After Microsoft /HP Deal
While cloud computing can be part of a growing IT department's solution , he said, it's "unrealistic" that any major enterprise is going to "go 100 percent cloud." Staten said key reasons are applications that don't fit the cloud model, compliance issues, and, often, cultural issues about managing IT resources in a remote cloud.
With IBM projecting the global cloud-computing market will grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent to $126 billion by 2012, the deal marks a new level for the growing industry of outsourced, cloud-based services.
The IBM/Panasonic deal comes a day after Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard announced they will spend $250 million over three years to codevelop cloud-computing systems. The goals are to develop a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model, to advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation, and to lower costs by eliminating complexities of management through automation.
Staten noted that the announcement signaled "a market expansion" for Microsoft, which has "done well so far in hosted services," as has IBM. He added that HP's portfolio of such services has been "pretty minimal" up to this point.
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