LotusLive's Web site is now the portal where all of IBM's Lotus "cloud" offerings are located, including e-mail, collaboration and Web conferencing, IBM announced Monday at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando.

At LotusLive.com, organizations can find a suite of hosted collaboration and communication services designed to be easy to use and adopt, without requiring a hefty IT investment, IBM said.

Built on open standards, LotusLive is designed to allow for simple integration with third-party applications. It features a "click to cloud" functionality to tie existing applications residing on customer servers with LotusLive services.

IBM has also announced partnerships with Skype, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com for LotusLive. LinkedIn, which operates a social network for professional contacts, plans to tie its site with LotusLive, Lotus Notes and Lotus Connections. Salesforce.com intends to integrate its CRM software with LotusLive services. Skype will provide voice and video capabilities within LotusLive.

This move by IBM is in line with the trend from vendors like Google, Zoho, Jive, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Socialtext, Jive Software, Central Desktop, Telligent and Atlassian and others to offer collaboration and communication applications via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.