“Combining IBM and Linden Lab’s solutions together has the potential to make custom-created environments a viable option for enterprises,” said IBM's VP of Digital Convergence, Colin Parris,today as IBM and Linden Lab announced the two companies are exploring the development of enterprise solutions for security-rich, custom virtual world creation and collaboration on the Second Life Grid platform.

Linden Lab is creator of the virtual world Second Life, and its Vice President of Business Affairs, Ginsu Yoon, said: “We share a vision that virtual world technologies and collaboration represent the future of business communication."

"Deploying regions of the Second Life Grid behind IBM’s firewall is a major milestone in the evolution of the Internet and will help accelerate the growth and adoption of all virtual worlds,” Yoon added.

As more enterprises and consumers explore the 3-D Internet, the ecosystem of virtual world hosts, application providers, and IT vendors need to offer a variety of standards-based solutions in order to meet end user requirements. To support this, IBM and Linden Lab are exploring interoperability for virtual world platforms and technologies, and plan to work with industry-wide efforts to further expand the capabilities of virtual worlds.  

At the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference this week, the two companies are demonstrating hosting regions of the Second Life Grid behind IBM’s firewall that will combine the operational scale and security of IBM’s BladeCenter with Second Life’s dynamic content creation tools and vibrant user community.

IBM plans to pilot a solution internally which, at that time, will be designed to allow IBM employees to explore the Second Life mainland and seamlessly cross over into IBM’s custom-built world behind the firewall without having to log on and off. This is similar to using the same browser to access corporate intranet pages as well as non-secure Internet sites. The goal is to allow IBM employees to access public spaces and private spaces within one Second Life client interface while privatizing and securing portions of the Second Life Grid behind IBM’s firewall.