Yesterday night (my time), there was an interesting discussion led by 57 Miles from the Metaversed.com team. Four invitees were present and discussed about the strategies of their corporations in Virtual Worlds. The venue was hosted by SAP at their (leased) location at Eclipse city Silicon City (Thanks Craig !) in Second Life. The event was well-organized and well-moderated.
An interesting article as a precursor was Gartner warning companies to carefully evaluate the use of public Virtual Worlds like Second Life.
My takeaway from the discussion was that Second life is a great public Virtual World. It gives companies the opportunity to see what Social Collaboration & socially compatible 3D visualization can do. It opens the door for them to see the vast options that this medium of information exchange provides. However it is just that, Second Life is in my opinion, is limited as an Enterprise tool for Virtual Worlds. The lack of confidentiality, stability can usually be root-cause-analyzed into putting it behind the Firewall. I feel the moment that Linden Labs propose a model for putting this behind the firewall, a lot of companies will become very interested. Suddenly we have the equivalents for a Public & Private Internet together with common interface.
At this point, the most typical question that is raised is what will be the business model of Linden Labs, I speculate even if they open source the servers, as long as they control the authorizing and the maintain the role of a gate-keeper they can continue to get good returns on their investments. As one hand they control the servers in the public sphere and charge private companies for the same and connectivity to the public world as required.
Very true Pranab – at the moment there are lots of questions around the potential for doing business in Secondlife (beyond strategy – just plain logistics) and you have highlighted some of the areas of concern and a possible way forward.
There is so much potential ahead of us – just one big speed hump in the road before we get there…
And good to see you blogging!!!!
Thanks Jasmin,
Well we have begun to touch the surface, the key it to ensure we see the full picture and leverage the advantages of this medium
Actually the island is called “Silicon City” – glad you enjoyed the event!
It’s an interesting time I think right now as we move forward and the next 12 months or so will prove to be quite interesting for the Enterprise.
Craig, updated the location. Thanks
Yeah Enterprises will need to understand how they utilize these new technologies with their current IT & business framework.