The White House has invited LiveOps, a Santa Clara, CA-based company, to join the President and First Lady in a forum hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls. LiveOps provides cloud-based solutions to labor needs predominantly in the contact center market. The company has an impressive list of investors (Benchmark Capital, Menlo Ventures, etc.), management (lots of eBay DNA), and board members, as well as high-profile customers like Salesforce.com and Kodak. It’s one of the first company to see the cloud computing trend and invested heavily in it. Now it’s definitely reaping the benefits, especially in this economy when companies are looking for any way to provide the most cost effective customer service.

So how did a west coast company focused on contact centers appear on the White House’s radar? Obviously LiveOps is perfectly qualified to speak to issues around workplace and labor challenges, but I’m just curious… after all, it’s a very niche segment of the economy.

Is it the $400,000 spent in 2009 on lobbying? It’s also interesting to see that Maynard Webb, Chairman and CEO, held the minority view in the 2008 presidential election compared to other employees. In that case I hope Webb is representing LiveOps at the forum just to mix things up a bit…

Press release from LiveOps here:

Washington, D.C. — March 30, 2010 — LiveOps today announced that the company will join the President and First Lady Wednesday to discuss the importance of workplace practices that allow America’s working men and women to meet the demands of their jobs without sacrificing the needs of their families. Hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Forum on Workplace Flexibility will bring together CEOs, small business owners, labor leaders and policy experts to share ideas and strategies for making the workplace more flexible for the American worker and parent.

“LiveOps plays an instrumental role in helping businesses and individuals change the way they think about and approach work,” said Maynard Webb, chairman and CEO of LiveOps. “We applaud the President and First Lady for recognizing the need for a sustainable work model that meets the needs of everyone from parents to students entering the workforce to people living in rural communities far from the center of business commerce. It is a time for innovation at work; and LiveOps is pleased to be helping thousands of individuals across the U.S. establish careers that include flexibility in the way they work and live.”

The White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility will focus on the challenges facing America’s working families and strategies for keeping Americans employed without forcing them to sacrifice parental responsibilities. As a successful company that contracts with more than 20,000 independent agents who work from home, LiveOps understands the critical need for parents to maintain a work-life balance. Founded in Florida in 2000, LiveOps has transformed one of the world’s largest labor-intensive markets: the contact center. Company founders harnessed the Internet to match call center managers with an infinite number of qualified workers — regardless of location. With no location or traditional work-schedule restraints, LiveOps learned it could quickly and easily scale to handle dynamic and unpredictable call volume. The ability to scale made LiveOps’ technology a perfect fit for the direct response industry — an ever-changing market that requires constant flexibility and adjustment. Today LiveOps provides its technology and services to companies in the financial, health, retail and marketing industries.

For additional information about the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, please visit the White House Web site at: www.whitehouse.gov.

About LiveOps, Inc.

LiveOps is a rapidly growing technology company offering two innovative solutions for enterprises: Contact Center in the Cloud, a SaaS technology platform for managing contact centers, and Workforce in the Cloud, an on-demand workforce for outsourcing call center calls. LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform brings the value of cloud computing to the contact center by enabling enterprises to rapidly deploy an always-on and instantly scalable contact center infrastructure in a pay-per-use model that enables customers to achieve greater operational and cost efficiencies. LiveOps uses this same technology platform everyday to successfully run the largest virtual call center with over 20,000 independent agents. LiveOps provides enterprises with the on-demand call center platform and community of on-demand independent agents to quickly achieve better business results. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.