PHUKET, Thailand -- Though not strictly a consumer product, IBM sees Lotus Symphony being adopted as an alternative to proprietary software in emerging markets.

Lotus Symphony, first announced by IBM late last year, is a free downloadable suite of Lotus-branded programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, similar to those from Microsoft Corp.

During the 1990s, IBM released its OS/2 operating system for desktop computing, which, like Windows, came with its own set of productivity software competing with Microsoft Office.

"Does this mean we are going back into the application space? No," said Edward Orange, director for Lotus at IBM Asia Pacific, in an interview with journalists from Southeast Asia.

During the LotusSphere summit here, IBM executives talked about Symphony addressing an already commoditized desktop software market.

"Symphony frees up users’ money," Edward said. "That is part of how we came up with it and why we came up with the product."

Symphony is tightly integrated into IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino email and collaboration tools, which again compete with Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange software.

"It's not just meant for business users but for other user groups as well like education," Edward said. In China alone, he said there have been around 260 million downloads of Lotus Symphony.

Asked whether Symphony can be used in low-cost PC designs targeted at emerging markets, Edward stressed IBM is not making it a commercial software, adding "We're fine to share it with anyone."

Symphony is based on open-source software developed by the OpenOffice.org consortium, the same code from which StarOffice was derived by Sun Microsystems.

Symphony also uses the OpenDocument Format, also supported by Sun and Web giant Google, and competes with Microsoft's Open Office XML.

IBM sees the value of Symphony as part of a bigger ecosystem of application developers using open standards. This means documents created using Symphony, for example, can easily be read by other applications.

But ultimately, Edward stressed Symphony is a free software anyone can use. In the US, people have been paying for software since and don't want to pay any more while in Asia, most users can't afford to pay," he said.