Collaboration, SaaS and wikis! Oh, my!

Bad news for CIOs. According to Sean Poulley, vice president of online collaboration services at IBM, his company's Global CEO Study for 2008 reveals that the top executive at 1,000 businesses of all sizes has now taken an interest in collaboration and the tools that support it. For good or ill, that can only mean meddling, or to put it kindly, interest, from above.

Collaboration, then, is on many a CIO's front-burner. Poulley contends that collaboration delivered as software as a service provides enough new value and a low enough risk that it will appeal to SMBs, if not larger concerns.

IBM's Project Bluehouse, still in beta, offers some of the collaboration services essential to a full suite of tools, such as document sharing, online meetings and instant messaging. But it lacks other important common features like a shared calendar.

Poulley would not comment on that, but argued IBM is "in no rush" to jump into the SaaS collaboration market.

"We're in the early innings right now," he says. "And it's going to be a long game."

Though you should expect to see IBM pitching Bluehouse to the wider market by January.

Another player in the collaboration game is Ross Mayfield, president of Socialtext Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. However, his company uses the wiki as the heart of its lineup of collaboration services.

Among the new offerings from the company is Socialtext People, which lets you create a shared knowledge base of individuals and an array of information associated with them. Another addition is Socialtext Calc, a powerful spreadsheet that lets you blend in wiki-based information, structured or unstructured, into its cells.

Socialtext People and Calc will be ready next month. You can try them for free for up to five users with a hosted version of Socialtext. Or you can pop in a pre-configured appliance for 100 users on your network for $4,950. And an open source version is also available.