IBM is expanding the free beta trial for Bluehouse, a Web-hosted social networking and collaboration service based on Lotus software.

Bluehouse had been in a limited beta for nine months but is now being opened to anyone who wants to join, says Bethann Craig, director of product management for IBM's Lotus Software. IBM is announcing the open beta Monday as part of a "cloud services initiative" in which IBM says it is helping customers both access cloud services over the Web and build cloud-like services that can be delivered internally to their own users.

Based on Lotus Foundations, Bluehouse is designed to help small- and midsized businesses collaborate securely beyond their organizational boundaries. File storing and sharing, Web meetings and IM are among the Bluehouse tools. After the free beta, Bluehouse will be made commercially available for a fee in early 2009.

The word "cloud" was nowhere to be seen when IBM first announced Bluehouse in January, but IBM is now calling Bluehouse a key piece of a company-wide cloud services initiative.

The change reflects both a strategic and marketing shift for IBM, as the company embraces the buzzword "cloud" over "software-as-a-service," the moniker previously assigned to such Web-hosted applications.

"Software-as-a-service now is becoming a subset of this broader concept of cloud computing," says IDC analyst Frank Gens. Software-as-a-service tools like Bluehouse are now being lumped into this broader category, which involves all types of services being delivered over the Web, including access to storage and processing power, he says. (Compare storage products.)

It's significant that big IT companies like IBM are committing to putting large portions of their products onto the Web, and this will only continue, Gens says. "Our view is that being able to provide software offerings through a cloud services model is the foundation for new growth for the industry," he says. "Bluehouse is Lotus moving much, if not most of what they do in a traditional software model, and putting it right out there in the cloud."

IBM said Monday that it is launching a new "company-wide initiative that extends its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for independent software vendors [ISV] and clients."