IBM employees get a Second Life

Avatars more attractive

By Sylvie Barak

IBM EMPLOYEES, fed up of having to attend meetings or interact with their colleagues in real life, will now have the opportunity to do so in their own private area of the virtual world, Second Life instead.

IBM will work with creators of Second Life, Linden Lab, to become the first company to occupy a little area of the fantasy world protected by IBM’s very own firewall. With its privacy ensured, IBM can then go about using its little business colony to carry out avatar meetings and collaboration projects, supposedly to facilitate content creation in 3D.

Previously, many companies who had considered the fantasy world as a corporate option were forced to abandon the idea due to the high potential of security breaches, and the fact that they were intermittently ambushed by the MMOG’s un-corporate, mainly spotty 14-year-old, players with virtual bombs and attacks of airborne genitalia.

According to Reuters, Linden Lab and IBM signed a joint agreement, to put certain parts of Second Life's "Grid" platform behind IBM's company firewall, and to host it on IBM Bladecenter servers.

Chief technology officer of IBM's Digital Convergence business, Neil Katz, said that IBM was "responding to what our customers have been asking for: they see the value in Second Life but are very concerned about security and want [internal] conversations to stay behind the firewall".

Linden's partnership with IBM now puts them in direct competition with other developers, including 500 Mirrors, Qwaq and Multiverse, who have long been trying to cash in on the increasing corporate interest in secure virtual worlds.

One thing is for sure, IBM won’t have to work too hard to train its employees on how to use the virtual Second Life world. Even Chief exec, Sam Palmisano, already has his own avatar and last September, Italian IBM workers held a virtual protest strike in Second Life over pay cuts.

The Inquirer