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Friday, April 04, 2008

InternetNews Realtime IT News – IBM Readies Second Life For Enterprise

InternetNews Realtime IT News – IBM Readies Second Life For Enterprise: "IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

This is an interesting development. There has been Jaiku discussion about the reluctance of Finnish companies to adopt social media and open innovation. This isn't IBM's first move in this direction. They have used collaborative techniques on a global scale before.

The project is in testing and will go live within several weeks. It marks a new focus by Second Life's parent company, Linden Lab, on providing software and services to corporate customers who want to use the virtual world for collaboration and teleconferencing.

Second Life might be the next big thing after Facebook...

IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas, which are hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall.

Security is an issue big companies are referring to...

This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.

I can understand this point. Multinationals have secrets that shouldn't travel outside their own server clouds and spaces.

IBM has long been one of the corporations most engaged with Second Life, a popular virtual world with several hundred thousand regular users as well as its own currency and economy.

More than 6,000 IBM employees have created the Second Life characters called avatars, and the company signed a pact with Linden Lab last Linden Lab last year to explore interoperability between different virtual worlds.

The project is structured as a joint development agreement, and no money will change hands, Colin Parris, IBM's vice president for digital convergence, said in a phone interview.

I'll follow this development...

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