IBM’s Lotusphere conference is taking place in Orlando, and news from it proves Big Blue is putting some serious force behind LotusLive, their cloud collaboration platform. Last week, Panasonic announced LotusLive would replace Microsoft Exchange at their offices, and the platform will soon be courting Google users it seems, as they’ve announced plans for a new generation of the product that has been described as Google Wave-esque.

Collaboration platforms in general are gaining ground, not just LotusLive, but they’re the ones making the big splash this week, and having the might of IBM only adds to the certainty of collaboration software becoming a corporate mainstay. Online collaboration platforms share many traits with CRM systems, and sometimes cloud collaboration has appeared to encroach on the CRM space.

That’s why it’s worth considering what online collaboration platforms will do the web conferencing segment in the long run. There are number of companies dealing almost exclusively in collaboration platforms, like Jive Social Business Software, and productivity software heavyweights like Oracle and Microsoft bring something to the table as well. However, while pretty much all online collaboration suites offer instant messaging and chat services, few offer video conferencing—for now.

LotusLive’s providing web conferencing tools is a big deal. From the looks of the demo, the conferencing platform isn’t as sophisticated as others offered, but it is a bonus for companies looking for an online collaboration suite, and is also a reason for a few of those companies to eschew the web conferencing vendor search.

However, at Lotusphere today, IBM announced that businesses looking for web conferencing solutions may just consider LotusLive anyways: IBM has expanded LotusLive’s integration partners, and PGi will resell LotusLive Meetings. PGi provides meeting and collaboration solutions, and LotusLive Meetings will be integrated with their audio conferencing platform.

I’m interested to see what happens to video conferencing in enterprise over the next couple years. Many online conferencing solutions are gaining ground and carving niches—like ViVu—but I wonder if we’ll see more movement in mergers and acquisitions as companies seek to beef up their collaboration offerings.