IBM to host private Second Life regions
By Adam Reuters
(Editor’s note: Due to a technical error, this story was posted in advance of an embargo set by Linden Lab and IBM.)
SECOND LIFE, April 2 (Reuters) - IBM said on Wednesday it will become the first company to host private regions of the Second Life Grid on its own servers, marking a new focus by Linden Lab on serving corporate customers.
Under the new project, currently in beta testing and set to go live within several weeks, 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. This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through Linden Lab’s servers.
Linden Lab’s move into the enterprise software sector comes at a time when the first wave of corporate adoption of Second Life — mostly for marketing and advertising purposes — has largely ended.
IBM has long been a major user of Second Life: more than 6,000 employees have created Second Life avatars, and it signed a pact with Linden Lab last year to explore interoperability between virtual worlds.
The project is structured as a joint development agreement, and no money will change hands, according to Colin Parris, IBM’s vice president for digital convergence.
“We see a need for an enterprise-ready solution that offers the same content creation capabilities but adds new levels of security and scalability,” he said. After an initial phase of using the private Second Life area internally, IBM will expand use to its own customers.
“We’re doing this internally and we’re building the right kind of enterprise grade solution,” Parris told Reuters in a phone interview.
Second Life is increasingly used by corporations and other organizations as a tool for collaboration and telecommunication, but adoption has been hindered by concerns about the platform’s stability and security. The IBM project, while groundbreaking, will not make it easier for companies to access Second Life from behind their own firewalls.
Second Life users who don’t work for IBM will be mostly unaffected by the new project. They will be unable to enter the private, IBM-hosted Second Life areas, much as they cannot currently enter the private areas which are hosted by Linden Lab.
IBM employees will be able to take virtual objects from the public Second Life into the private areas, but not from private areas to public ones.
Will SL users be able to see the private islands on a map?
Thanks for the story!
Thu Apr 3, 2008 4:04am PDTWill IBM be running a version of Linden Lab’s server technology or will IBM be using something like the OpenSim server?
Thu Apr 3, 2008 9:04pm PDTAlthough not totally unexpected, this is, indeed, great news, which are very, very welcome!
It would be nice to know if IBM is running their own set of asset servers — effectively having a separate grid, integrated at a “meta-level” (similar to what the Architecture WorkGroup is planning, with different “grid providers” having their own internal structure, totally autonomous but interconnected with LL’s asset servers) — or if they are just running LL’s server software but share LL’s asset servers.
Obviously, we’re all eager to see when IBM is going to launch the service for their customers — and what Terms of Service they’re going to impose on them!
(A question only: what’s the “embargo” mentioned on the beginning of the article??)
Fri Apr 4, 2008 2:04am PDTAs a content creator in Second Life, I will not allow the use of my design or any creations I did (or in which I was involved), to be used behind a corporate firewall.
Fim Fischer
Fri Apr 4, 2008 1:04pm PDThttp://fimfischer.eu
Excellent news for those (consumer) Avatars with no place to live yet.
Will it be possible to take advantage of economies of scale and improved service reliability from the European region during extended business hours - including week-ends?
A choice is always welcome!
Fri Apr 4, 2008 10:04pm PDT@Josef
?
The IBM region is for IBM employees only. No “choice” is being offered to the SL general population quite yet.
Sat Apr 5, 2008 10:04am PDT@4:
Sun Apr 6, 2008 9:04am PDTAre you sure that your wishes will be respected in this case?
for them to be respected there should be at least way to specify them in-world on item creation. There proposals in JIRA to make licensing more flexible (for CC-based licenses but could be used for other things too, like that you wish)
If IBM will just host their own sims+proxy for asset server AND IBM avatar ever comes to ‘public’ grid they could move whatever they want.
If IBM will be infact testing AWG’s proposals on ‘multigrid’(created by multiple companies,agent domain code branch etc), it will enterly depend on how access relations are setup.