This week it seems IBM is joining the merry cloud circus as well. They launched a test version of Bluehouse, a business-oriented cloud computing platform that adds a bit of social networking, most of it based on IBM’s Lotus software.

The platform is designed to offer companies the opportunity for a smoother transition to cloud technology, decrease operational costs, and improve collaboration and communication across the enterprise.

IBM’s portfolio describes Bluehouse as “the industry’s first online social networking and collaboration service designed for business. “Bluehouse” combines social networking and online collaboration tools to help businesses of all sizes securely work together through firewalls and beyond organizational boundaries. This suite of hosted online technologies allows individuals to share documents, contacts, engage in joint project activities, host online meetings and build communities via cloud computing through a Web browser”

IBM’s cloud initiative brings a series of software-as-a-service programs, which run through a web browser and are executed remotely on their servers, but also provide tools to help software development companies to design, build, deliver, and sell cloud-based variants of their software that either run on their own IT infrastructure, or on servers owned by IBM and/or one of their hosting partners.

In preparation for this, the company has set up a worldwide “Blue Cloud” network of 13 linked data centers in certain countries, where the hardware will support cloud computing services for those specific countries.

As stated before, Bluehouse technology is based mostly on the Lotus line of products, including e-mail, calendar and contact applications and such, which are already used by large corporations. Now IBM is adding Web conferencing applications to that, as well as instant messaging, document sharing and team management. All of this is bundled into one package accessible straight from a browser.

While IBM is working on the networking and collaboration angle of Cloud software, other companies are taking other approaches: Cisco seeks to connect its WebEx voice conferencing software to its Voice over Internet Protocol phones, focusing thus on the network; Microsoft is touting a set of easy to use software packages (nothing new there); and Google is working on the ability to manipulate files online with the ease of desktop applications.

All of these companies are looking to get customers’ attention and secure a niche of this new and rapidly-evolving business field. And since we’re talking about the big players, they’re all naturally taking advantage of all the small upstarts eager (or yet to be convinced) to “go cloud”, and portion out smaller slices of said niche, turning cloud computing into a manner of online feudal system where the king gives knights a portion of terrain to work who in turn gives smaller portions to the peasants, I mean customers.