IBM on Monday has entered the cloud-computing market with LotusLive, a series of online collaboration services. For now, some of them are still under development, and pricing for the cloud version of Notes has not been released to the public.

This comes after a year of public beta of LotusLive, which was known as BlueHouse. The service was officially announced at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, and users can now sign up and start using two LotusLive services, Meetings and Events.
 
Meetings integrates audio and videoconferencing and costs $48 to $99 per month, depending on the number of participants, or 25 cents per minute. Events is intended to help users manage and host online conferences. Furthermore, it also handles registration and other chores, costing $99 per month or 30 cents per minute per guest.

Another service offered by LotusLive is Notes, which is available for sale. The interested ones must fill out a form and an IBM sales representative will contact you. As with the LAN version of Notes, the online services offers e-mail, calendar and scheduling, and is intended for large companies. Even so, IBM does not stop here, as it also offers Engage, which lets users build online communities around the Web meeting experience. The service is currently available only as a beta.

LotusLive won't be alone, as IBM announced the new service will integrate with the LinkedIn, Salesforce.com and Skype networks. An interesting fact shows that IBM started an initiative with Red Hat designed to help channel partners migrate customers from Microsoft desktop software to Linux-based desktops running Lotus applications.