Filed under: News and developments by Digado

The dedication of IBM to virtual worlds interoperability has reached a new milestone: Second Life servers behind the firewalls. Reuters (who broke the embargo a little too early) reports of the first series of company owned servers using Second Life technology. The operate in IBM’s private network behind firewalls, though can be opened to their 6000 employees already present within Second Life and enable them to cross between the private, and public ‘grids’.

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.

Of course this is a great milestone, especially the interoperability with the main grid of Second Life. I wonder if this jeapordizes the open sourcing of the sim (server) software as Linden Labs might just have tapped into a ‘new’ market if they can keep providing their software as sort of a ‘white label’ using the IBM research in interoperability.

IBM / Linden Labs seem to have ‘tackled’ the issue of content being transferable to private area’s uncontrolled by Second Life protocol (which sets the permissions for virtual items to either, copy, modify, or transfer - or any combination of these to maintain the artificial scarcity and essentially the value of products) by allowing objects to get transferred into the private area’s, but not exported from the private area’s.

Earlier this week Multiverse announced their plans to create privately hosted worlds behind the firewalls, and adding typical office tools (whiteboard, powerpoint) and create the virtual workfloor in their environment. More on this over on Virtual Worlds News.

Source: Reuters | IBM to host private Second Life regions

Posted on: April 3, 2008 | Share on: