The partnership between Second Life and IBM centers on giving companies the ability to run their own version of Second Life on their own servers. IBM is currently building a version of Second Life for their own internal use behind their firewall, and plans to streamline the installation process in order to offer this capability as a service to other companies that aren’t comfortable with the limited security of a hosted service.
IBM plans to use the service for conferences, special events and meetings for both customers and employees. I like the focus on cutting travel costs and the impact of travel on the environment.
There’s a good story about the partnership in Information Week. The story indicates that Second Life growth has been flat for about a year at 500,000 regular users, and that the company has recently shed their CEO and are in search of a new one.
