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.
