IBM has jumped onto the cloud computing bandwagon. The company launched Bluehouse, a Web-based social networking and collaboration service designed for business. It incorporates social networking for business, contact sharing, online meetings, joint projects, and many other online community features. Bluehouse is intended as a way for businesses to connect with partners, agencies, suppliers, customers, and outside experts.

The company’s hopes its products will help businesses of all sizes more easily adopt cloud computing models to better manage data, lower operational costs, and make collaboration easier. Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Citrix, Zoho and many other companies are rolling out such services.

“We are moving our clients, the industry and even IBM itself to have a mixture of data and applications that live in the data center and in the cloud,” said Willy Chiu, vice president, high performance on demand solutions, IBM. “IBM’s cloud computing strategy was inspired by feedback from the business world’s broadest IT customer base indicating a growing desire to utilize data, applications and services from any device and from any location based on open standards.”

IBM has a four-pronged strategy to capture the cloud computing opportunity by: 1) delivering its own cloud services portfolio; 2) helping ISVs design, build, deliver and market cloud services; 3) helping clients integrate cloud services into their business; and 4) providing cloud computing environments to businesses.