IBM is starting to monetize Lotus Symphony, its freebie collection of Office-displacing ODF-based software for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations – but not for the money.

It’s offering unlimited subscription-based remote technical support to large organizations to get more of them on board. Companies tend to eschew unsupported product.

It claims Symphony could save a 20,000-man company $8 million in Office 2007 software license fees or $4 million in software renewals.

IBM’s Elite Support runs $25 a head for 1,000 employees.

Launched into beta last September, IBM says Symphony, just now gone GA, has been downloaded by nearly a million people. It’s available in 24 languages.

Symphony can be extended with plug-ins linking it, say, to corporate ERP or CRM systems.

IBM is also reaching out to smaller businesses with up 500 people with a turnkey collaboration product, available through resellers, called Lotus Foundations, which wraps Symphony up with Lotus Notes and Domino mail, file management, directory services, firewall, backup and recovery, anti-virus and anti-spam along with support for Microsoft Outlook.

The Linux-based Foundations server, built on what it acquired with Net Integration Technologies, is part of what IBM is calling its Blue Business Platform, meant to simplify life for SMBs, and targets Microsoft’s Small Business Server.

Its turnkey Lotus Foundations Start, the first in a line of software appliances, is priced at $949 for five users; each additional user is $149. IBM describes it as self-configuring, self-healing and self-managing.

So far it’s only available in English but Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish are promised by July 30.

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