It’s a familiar story.  An occupying army is bogged down in hostile territory threatened on one side by a well-armed, well-financed insurgency and on the other by a group of innovative and resourceful fanatics.  Is the wisest course to begin a phased withdrawal or should you pour more troops and resources into the trouble zone in hopes of salvaging some sort of victory.

For IBM, the answer seems to be:  a little bit of both. 

On Monday, IBM Lotus launched a huge surge into social networking with Lotus Connections, which wraps five social networking technologies up into one integrated package, offering enterprise customers a menu of social software tools:  employee blogs, employee profiles, activities or projects, communities of like minded employees, and a bookmarks function for sharing information such as websites and documents.  As Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk explains it:

It’s a couple of technologies most of us know (and love) – blogs, bookmarks, and FaceBook style profiles – integrated with preexisting offerings like Sametime and Activity Explorer. In other words, it’s like a local version of del.icio.us that’s preintegrated with WordPress, Jabber, FaceBook and a Sharepoint-ish project/team document system. A bit difficult to explain, in other words, but quite compelling once you’ve seen it in action.

That, of course, is also part of the problem.  WordPress, Jabber, FaceBook and del.icio.us are free Web 2.0 technologies that many small and fair-sized companies are already using as a kind of cobbled-together “best-of-breed” social networking/collaboration suite.  They’re easy to use, scalable, and they’ve been tested by millions of users.  What IBM Lotus is betting is that enterprises will pay a lot of money for applications they could get free in order to have an integrated “business grade” solution with branded IBM-level security.  They are probably right.

Lotus could use a new hit.  Notes,  a profitable but rusty old tank left over from the Gulf War I era, has been losing ground to Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint platforms as well as to cool new communications applications from Web 2.0 startups.  Both are serious challengers but right now, IBM Lotus seemed most focused on the recapturing the momentum from the insurgents from Redmond.  I listened in via telephone to a blogger press conference at Lotusphere where Michael Rhodin, general manager, IBM Lotus managed to get in several good licks at Microsoft.  My favorite:  “We not dealing in futureware here or products that may be years or decades off.  Ninety-nine percent of the applications we’re announcing today will be available by early summer.”

Will the IBM Lotus surge and its planned followups be enough to turn the collaboration/enterprise social networking space into a real dogfight?  For sure.  Will IBM Lotus emerge as the clear victor?  Maybe not, but Lotus Connections is a solid offering that is going to have a lot of appeal to corporations with money to burn.

And, if not, IBM has a real Web 2.0 killer app cooking back in the labs.