IBM announced a new SaaS offering for collaboration at their Lotusphere 2009 conference, dubbed LotusLive.  There appears to be three main offerings to LotusLive: Networking and Collaboration, Web Conferencing, and LotusLive Email services – which appears to be a version of Lotus Notes in a web-based format.

According to the company press release:

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.

What’s most interesting about this news is IBM’s plans to partner with several key SaaS vendors:

• LinkedIn will provide LotusLive with searchable contact information.
• Salesforce.com will integrate LotusLive services within its CRM application.
• Skype announced plans to integrate voice and video into LotusLive.

Right now only LotusLive Meetings (Lotus Sametime) and LotusLive Events along with the hosted Notes application appear to be available for purchase, with the other solutions still showing up as being in beta.  I wasn’t able to find details on when IBM plans to make the additional functionality available.

The dashboard page for the collaboration component looks a lot like what you might expect from a "web2.0” site, and is actually pretty slick looking.

Even without the details about when it’ll be available, it’s exciting news from IBM, and it stacks up nicely against Microsoft and their plans for more SaaS offerings with the upcoming Office 14 release, as well as Google’s recent push to start selling Google Apps through their recently announced reseller program.

More details at LotusLive.com, full LotusLive press release at IBM.

Filed under: Enterprise Web, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SaaS, Social Computing