I went to Lotusphere last week and came away with a number of impressions of the conference:

* While last year’s event was crowded, this year it seemed to be even more crowded. One source estimated that there were a couple of thousand more attendees at this year’s conference.

* IBM Lotus has been very active over the past year, expanding its collaborative offerings with new or updated products like Unyte, Quickr, Connections, Mashups and Sametime, among several others. The company wants to be a major player in Web 2.0 and its growing base of new and updated offerings is positioning the company quite well in this market.

* IBM is also getting more into the e-mail security business with its Protector offering. A variety of modules focused on compliance, data leakage protection and other areas are planned for the future, and licenses can be transferred back and forth between the appliance and virtualized offerings. This is already a very competitive market, but IBM’s offerings may find strong acceptance among existing Notes/Domino shops.

* More interesting, however, was the announcement of the company’s Bluehouse offering that will provide hosted collaborative offerings for companies primarily under 500 seats. While Bluehouse does not include hosted Notes/Domino, I anticipate that this will be made available at some point in the not-too-distant future.

* Sametime continues to be a market leader in the real-time communications market with 20 million dedicated users and 100 million Sametime-enabled users through Notes/Domino. Interestingly, one-third of the new Sametime seats deployed in 2007 were in Exchange shops.

One of the more important overall impressions I came away with, however, is that IBM Lotus really seems to be getting traction in terms of how people think about the company. A couple of years ago, one could have made a somewhat arguable case that the company was in defensive mode, attempting to convince people why they should not migrate to another platform. Today, the impression is clearly one of being on the offense and providing a number of very innovative offerings focused heavily on greater collaborative capabilities and a significant move downmarket into the SMB space.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.