Enterprise Briefing

 

 

 

The notion of a virtual world where groups of like-minded individuals can collaborate in environments that mimic the physical realm is compelling. Its success can be seen in the rapid growth of virtual world environments ranging from first-person video games (most notably World of Warcraft) to more general online watering holes (such as Second Life, Qwaq and Multiverse). In these fully-electronic realms, participants can adopt an online persona or “avatar” and join others online to play a game, keep in touch with family and friends, or simply mingle.

 

To date, most virtual world solutions have been targeted at consumers, but as with YouTube or instant messaging (IM), virtual-world environments have begun filtering into the enterprise market. Enterprise uses for virtual world environments include: direct commerce (B2B, B2C, etc.), community building, training, research, marketing, public relations, events, and customer relationship management (CRM).

 

Forward-thinking vendors are already using virtual world technologies to communicate with customers and partners. Cisco is among a handful of communications vendors using the Second Life virtual environment for sales presentations, executive Q&A sessions, user group meetings, and other business communications purposes. IBM has been investing in virtual world research since 2006 and is also integrating its Sametime unified communications and collaboration platform with Forterra’s On-line Interactive Virtual Environment.

 

 

Virtual worlds open up new and exciting possibilities for business communications and collaboration. They provide a forum for very large groups of individuals to interact with one another in a way simply not possible with today’s audio conferences, video conferences, telepresence sessions, and workgroup-based web collaboration platforms. Users have more control over whom they interact with and how the interaction is to take place. In a virtual world environment, users can easily identify speakers based upon that person's avatar. Also, users are able to more fluidly interact with other participants without disrupting the current speaker.

 

This ability to combine group/public and private communication seamlessly is an important hallmark of virtual world environments. Users attending a group/public function can use non-verbal cues such as proximity, appearance and gesture to communicate. Or users can more directly engage in private IM conversations, which can move effortlessly into a group/public IM session within the broader collaboration space – all without interfering with the meeting at hand.

 

Integrating unified communications technologies with virtual world environments will also allow users to view presence, availability and location information of colleagues in the virtual world environment. This will enable virtual world meetings to be scheduled and initiated from existing calendar applications along with document sharing, application sharing, white boarding and other collaborative applications. The integration of enterprise communications software will also make higher-quality voice communications available to participants.

 

 

Currently, virtual worlds are most popular with online gaming communities and consumer-oriented social software environments. Outside of isolated pockets, virtual worlds remain uncharted territory for enterprises already making significant investments in IP telephony, unified communications, fixed-mobile convergence, Web conferencing, and a variety of other transformative communications technologies. Common to all these technologies is the insistence from business buyers that the platforms be perfectly secure, governable, and able to make use of existing IT resources and applications. Employees’ use of virtual worlds could bypass corporate security policies and as a result make business buyers skittish in investing in them. Similarly, without the ability to fully-integrate internal systems such as messaging/email, enterprise users will be unlikely to integrate virtual world tools into their daily routine.

 

Developers of communications and collaboration software are expanding their product initiatives to integrate real-time communications systems, productivity applications and collaboration software into virtual world environments. In addition, virtual world vendors are working to both empower these undertakings and create direct opportunities through software-as-a-service (SaaS) and managed hosting solutions. Coupled with the current economic climate and rising energy costs that favors collaboration without physical travel, this move will create forward momentum for these projects. Already conferencing vendors of all stripes (audio, video, Web) are reaping the rewards of these market pressures.

 

However, virtual world solutions will need to do more than open their doors to developers and provide hosted offerings. Virtual world solutions must slip seamlessly into existing IT environments. The need for security, manageability and enterprise application integration will create a distinct but short-lived opportunity for enterprise collaboration providers to deliver virtual-world capabilities within existing, enterprise IT-proven products. It is likely that traditional enterprise vendors will lean upon external partnerships with third-party virtual world providers to this end, though no substantial, productized moves have been made as yet. Nonetheless, as these projects go forward, it is likely that more enterprise customers will find a compelling business case for virtual world collaborative tools.