LotusLive Engage: Can you afford it?

Lotus just introduced LotusLIve Engage, the online meeting component to LotusLive, its suite of collaboration services.

According to the release, Engage is "an integrated portfolio of social networking and collaboration services that allows people to work smarter by providing easy to use, security-rich online meetings, profile and contact management, file sharing, instant messaging, and lightweight project management tools."

I'll  have more info later when I speak with Lotus. E-mail me any question that you have for IBM at dave@stanalytics.com or leave them below  and I'll ask 'em for you. One of the question on my mind will be payment for the LotusLIve services. InformationWeek's John Foley makes a good point noting that IBM does a better job addressing the extended enterprise withi its cloud services than the SMB:

IBM's cloud strategy is characterized by products and on-demand services that are aimed at IT departments and businesses, not at individual developers, entrepreneurs, and end users. While you can pay by the hour for Amazon Web Services with a credit card, IBM tends to require an annual contract for its services.

If IBM is interested in small business then that's going to have to change. You can sign up and learn more about Engage here.