SLENTRE.COM

By Sigmund Leominster

Imagine your boss asking you to spend more time in Second Life at work. For full pay. This may sound like a fantasy for SL devotees who risk the occasional trip in-world while huddled in an office cubicle. But a new joint project between “Big Blue” and Linden Lab may offer these kinds of opportunities.

In a recent press release, Ginsu Yoon, Linden Lab’s vice president of business development, revealed that research is underway to create corporate Second Life servers running on IBM servers and protected by Big Blue firewalls.

Past forays by big corporations into Second Life have been spotty and generally unsuccessful. From a marketing perspective, SL’s relatively small population cannot realize the sales of goods offered by real world companies like BMW, Toyota, and others. Another potentially exciting use involves fostering SL as a location for holding virtual collaborations, such as international business meetings, corporate training sessions, R&D modeling, and so on. Speedy advances in this realm have been slowed by security fears. Discussing your Brazil marketing strategy for your new Widget 2008 is unlikely to be successful if a group of griefer penis avatars start dancing around the conference table.

According to IBM’s Neil Katz, Chief Technology Officer, the demand for virtual worlds from corporate bodies is there. “We talk to customers all the time who want to use this technology in their companies, but they worry about keeping the conversations and information secure.”

The aim appears to be to provide the intranet-equivalent of Second Life behind a company’s firewall where employees can interact. If a company’s intranet is global, the SL server could offer a collaborative opportunity above and beyond the traditional “share desktop and phone conference” model. Departments could have their own SL buildings, international distributors could have SL-equivalent offices, global strategic meetings could take place at virtual conference centers with SL junkets to popular locations. And once secure access is achieved between corporate servers and the public domain, the possibilities increase dramatically.

The current goal is to have something in place before the end of 2008. This seems like an aggressive schedule considering the generally encountered instability of the current Linden Lab Second Life server/client system. But if IBM is prepared to invest significant amounts of research time into server security and stability, early 2009 would not be an unreasonable real target.

Two factors are at work helping to drive this project. The first is the now-obvious move by Linden Lab to gear towards expansion and a future IPO. An overt partnership with Big Blue can’t fail to have an upward effect on any IPO prices. The second is the potential threat from other sims, such as the OpenSim platform. It would serve Linden Lab well to become the virtual world of choice for business.