IBM has thrown its hat in the SaaS office collaboration suite ring this week with the announcement of the online version of Lotus Notes, Lotus Live (aside: why does that redirect to a secure channel even if you slap an "http" on the front? People gotta encrypt their marketing information now? I've noticed that trend on a few sites now and wonder what exactly I am missing that this seems like a good idea?), at Lotusphere.

Coming only a couple week's after Apple's iWork.com announcement, and quite some time after heavyweights Google and Microsoft got into the game, this entry smacks of "me too" follow the leader gamesmanship. LotusLive has the same promises for interfaces to popular networking sites (of questionable utility), that "cloud" based cachet, and promises of bigger and better things to come. But is a vanilla offering late in the game enough to make a substantial dent in the market? Or does IBM really care? More after the jump.



The offering is pricy, as you might expect from IBM, with online conferencing costing between $48 and $99 a month depending on the package, or $.25 per minute per user. Get everyone together on cellphones for less, even internationally! Notes will reportedly run between $8 and $18 per user per month, although IBM is being cagey about pricing for the e-mail and messaging component, choosing to make it available only through a more traditional person to person sales channel.

As with Apple's effort, I tend to see this is something that has simply trickled out as a "must have" offering to make it appear that the company is keeping up with the field on innovative web-based services. But like Microsoft, I also see it as a failure of conventional product development and deployment in the SaaS market-place. By straddling the fence, these companies are artificially limiting themselves in their ability to offer truly differentiated services and handicapping their competetiveness against the more pure players in the market. In part this is rational self-interest; the longer that the collaboration software market stays on-premises, the less pain Big Blue feels from the reduced margins of the SaaS variant. But by keeping prices high and innovation low on that offering, all they are really offering to potential customers is a brand name and a certain reliability which newer competitors may be lacking.

I have no doubt that will be sufficient for the more conservative and staid clientele that IBM serves. I doubt very much whether it will prove compelling to new business.