Linden Lab will launch its ‘stand-alone solution for enterprise’ next week in San Francisco and we’ll get all the details about how companies and schools and secret government agencies can run their own little mini-grids behind firewalls and wear suits and ties or naval uniforms while reviewing PowerPoint presentations.
The folks over at 3DTLC cornered Amanda Linden on her recent Second Life blog post about work avatars, which I think was meant to leverage the Gartner data and say something along the lines of “hey, other people are taking avatars seriously for work, isn’t that great?” but became a community pile-on instead, parsing the many meanings of wearing a suit and tie to the office, and then more broadly the purpose of Second Life, and then it trailed off into all kinds of sub-clauses and conversations.
Amanda was left mixing metaphors with 3DTLC:
“Sometimes I think about Second Life like Las Vegas,” she said. “Las Vegas is where you can go and play, or you can go and work, as it’s one of the largest conference centers in the world – there’s a lot to do there, and all this benefits from each another, the balance between work and play. The comparison, though, is a dangerous thing. I think the bottom line is that Second Life is a place where you can work, and you can play. It’s a place where you can enhance and improve your real life. Whether you come there to attend concerts, play games, meet with a community or attend religious services, or come in to work, I think Second Life is a large enough space to accommodate all of those things. Second Life is about the size of Rhode Island in terms of land size. It’s a big place.”
So, Second Life is like Vegas, except we shouldn’t compare it to Vegas, we should actually compare it to Rhode Island.
Virtual World Smackdown
OK, it’s kind of unfair – the 3DTLC folks were trying to figure out the message being sent by the talk about work avatars and it was a pretty interesting thread. They wanted to understand the connection with the coming launch of a corporate solution, once called Nebraska, (and for some of us probably always Nebraska it will be, unless the new name is a real zinger like, hmmm, maybe iWorld or iAvatar or iWork although they were probably already grabbed by Apple.)
Personally, I think the real storyline here is about competition. It’s not about ‘safe’ grids or work avatars or dress codes or being disconnected from Las Vegas. The competition has those things already. And some of those safe grids with dull avatars look really crappy, like Forterra. And some of them look pretty sweet, like Protosphere. (I won’t mention Qwak because I can’t remember it’s new name, and there’s those Flash/Unreal mash-ups like 3DXplorer and Web.Alive and all those online conference products, but those aren’t really worlds, they’re Flash interfaces with cartoons, kind of like Electric Sheep tried to do with their full-frontal (fully clothed) lesbian chat space.)
But the Lab isn’t talking competition. Believe me. I’ve asked them about it. Several of them.
“How do you compare to, say, Forterra” and no matter which of them I ask it’s always pretty much the same answer, the kind that Amanda gave:
“”The blog entry wasn’t about the competition at all,” she said. “It was about Second Life and about the kinds of things that we as a community need to do to accelerate adoption. It was exclusively focused on us and our community. Competition is healthy and a great thing, and we are in the very early days in terms of virtual worlds penetration in the marketplace. Nobody has sized the market, and nobody has sized the projected growth of the market. Competition is very healthy in new markets, and especially in new markets, because it catayzes innovation and growth.”"
Which is kind of stunning when you think about it and I’ve had the same response every time: we don’t acknowledge the competition, the market is big enough for all of us anyways, and the market will be so huge who cares, except that we don’t know how big the market is, so we’ll all find out together!
How can you spend a year and countless man-years of time putting together a solution for enterprise and not have any idea how large the market is? Or maybe they know but aren’t saying? Can’t they extrapolate from other data or something? How about something like this:
“We know that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. We believe there’s a place for immersive technology as a key value-driver in this marketplace, because it allows companies to create a collaborative space within Web 2.0 and enterprise systems that can not be achieved with any other technology.
What differentiates Linden Lab from the competition is, frankly, our users. In fact, if you think about it, Second Life itself represents one of the most robust development APIs in the industry today. The scripts, content and applications that have been built for Second Life represent terrabytes of data – terrabytes more than other platforms could create even if their internal developers did nothing else for 1,000 years.
So, Nebraska is not a technology or a server so much as a platform which allows companies to securely plug-in to the largest ecosystem of developers and content in the virtual world industry today.
What does this mean for industry? It means that we have proven technology, proven solutions, and a proven development community. We’re able to support a wide range of use cases and can get you up and running and creating value for your company in, literally, weeks if that’s what you need. And we’re able to adapt it to your specific business goals effectively and quickly.”
I mean, seriously. Screw the competition – how can they keep up with 10,000 coders and content developers and a couple hundred service providers and hundreds of use cases?
The Target Market Is NOT Enterprise
The target market for Nebraska won’t be enterprise.
I have to give Amanda and the folks at the Lab a free pass from criticism for now. Their hands are tied until they can get this thing out into the market. I know there’s stuff they want to say and will say and everything will start to make sense in a few days, and even if some people don’t agree with the approach, at least it will be out there, and in the meantime they need to tiptoe around making any big claims about Nebraska or even in describing what it is. As an associate of mine says: “We need to keep our powder dry”.
But it seems to me that the real target for Nebraska will be content creators, application developers, and channel specialists.
Nebraska will have, as I say, something that none of the other platforms currently offer: a truly deep, rich, and robust API. When the MediaAPI comes, that API will only become more incredible. And the API is the thing that allows you to access 3D content (oh, and maybe even meshes some day), and scripts, and hooks in to Web sites, and animations, and, sure, work avatars with nice hair.
The API has been running now for years. What’s MISSING from the API is the ability to integrate it, and the platform its connected to, with enterprise systems like LDAP for authentication and Exchange servers and whatever else there is that makes IT people all excitable.
What’s also missing are channels. We have work, and we have education, but we don’t really have one specifically for health, or automotive, or energy and sustainability.
For Nebraska to blow the competition out of the water, and for this to make sense for enterprise, will require a well organized and supported developer community – whether it’s the folks making clothes on the Main Grid or some guy in his basement hacking a new interface to corporate Nings or whatever they have back there behind the firewalls.
It will be the serendipitous inventions that come out of creating a pool of opportunities attached to use cases and needs that get the creative juices flowing again. And I can tell you – those game-changing type apps, the Scion Chickens for the corporate world, will not come from wandering around with work avatars scratching our corporate chins – they’ll come because Second Life has managed to attract an incredibly broad and diverse range of incredibly talented people on a platform that prizes and values creativity.
The Main Grid
For this to work, the Lab has a two-fold challenge: to nurture a development community so that enterprise has a full range of solutions ‘out-of-the-box’ to meet their different use cases (and the ability to rapidly change and customize those offerings); and to keep the Main Grid growing.
Because I’m convinced that the ‘world’ which is Second Life isn’t just a good starting place for business before they decide whether they REALLY want to hide behind the firewall or not (and most of them probably SHOULDN’T – there’s too much benefit in being part of the larger community) – but it’s the source of rich and enduring value both to casual users, content creators, and the larger ecosystem.
Innovation and invention isn’t going to happen so easily behind the firewall: it will happen in the often messy and chaotic world which is Second Life, where a chicken or a mutating flower is more than just some cool new way to spend some time, they’re actually little insights into a platform in which possibility and value comes because we have a canvas for self-expression.
Whether we’re wearing ties or not.
Ask TomTom and Garmin what they think of the “competition” in the GPS Map Naviggation space right now after Google made the service free. (Their stocks became near worthless in one day)
Maybe other readers can figure out the parallel.
Ann – I was thinking about that last night when I read the NY Times article on it. Not sure what conclusion I came to, but at least I was thinking.
The Nebraska product will open new revenue opportunities not only for the Lab, but for content developers, as companies unwrap their new 3D world and realize there’s nothing inside it, and then go looking for people who can help. My two questions I’d like to have answered by Metanomics are:
1. Will the Lab compete with their own development community for such work, play favorites by keeping such bidding opportunities closed when the company purchasing Nebraska suggests they will need someone to help build their world, or stand aside and let the growing Solution Provider network of content developers bid on this work?
2. With so many products already available on XStreet, will there ever be a way to purchase this content and import it into a Nebraska installation? When you compare the cost of purchasing ready-made products versus hiring a team of content developers, I am sure companies interested in Nebraska would certainly see more value gained from buying existing products.
“The API has been running now for years. What’s MISSING from the API is the ability to integrate it, and the platform its connected to, with enterprise systems like LDAP for authentication and Exchange servers and whatever else there is that makes IT people all excitable.”
This is really the key, it’s that integration that we’ve been missing for so long – and need on the Main Grid, too.
Are we using the term Main Grid now? That’s not a very good world name, and once all these grids proliferate and we have to describe where our “place” is located.. Chilbo Community on the Mainland of the Main Grid in Second Life. Hmph.)
I know you don’t really care but Qwaq is now Teleplace.
I’m also very interested in Coyle’s questions.
If the content creators don’t have a boost in their economic outlook we will continue to see a ‘brain drain’ as people more and more feel that earning peanuts doesn’t pay tier (let alone RL rent).
It’s pretty bloody annoying to be lectured by a Linden flak about “what we as a community need to do” to advance their corporate goals.
When Linden Research starts treating their existing customers more like members of a community and less like temporary food maybe they can start calling on “the community” for help.
@Fleep & Dusan, LDAP doesn’t get many IT people excited anymore. Exchange, *yawn*. I also don’t see the MediaAPI being a “must have”, or even a selling point for Nebraska. If the target market is developers, then the source should either be opened, or offer a MUCH more extensible API offering than currently provided. The real killer apps will come from developers creating their own API’s and new functionality into the core product rather than more useless social website apps against it. I mean, just how many killer apps can be created off of one API? As I’ve said before, SL is now playing catchup with the rest of the innovation happening on the Internet and with substitute 3D world products (like OLIVE and ECS’ Nexus) that run behind the firewall.
As for integration, I think Nebraska should offer the ability to “hypergrid” with Mainland/Main Grid what have you. But this seems counter-intuitive to the product’s design as a stand-alone implementation. If Nebraska is to integrate, it should not only offer the option to integrate with Mainland, but also with XStreet.
Ok, I walked away from this I swear, only to have an even more perplexed look on my face.
Why would content creators pay for an instance of Nebraska (it isn’t free I’m assuming), when the obvious alternative is to freely download and install the OpenSim “platform”, run it on their server or home PC, and create content on it for free? A tool like Second Inventory could even allow the created assets on a local OpenSim installation to be uploaded to SL’s main grid and refined if needed.
Why would developers pay for an instance of Nebraska at all? The MediaAPI is the same whether you are programming against it on your Nebraska install or against the public SL servers. If a client wants a behind-the-firewall solution, I can still do my development and testing against the public servers, then just take my code behind the client’s firewall, change the URI, and I’m done.
The official LL blog regarding the upcoming reveal Nov 4th states, “‘“Nebraska’ is the much-anticipated behind-the-firewall solution which will allow enterprise to host their own virtual world environments within their organizations”. Enterprise, enterprise, enterprise. Mark said “enterprise”. So I’m anxious to hear more about this Nov 4th, the price (because an alternative is free), the “integration”, and opportunities for the Solution Provider community to be made aware of, and included in the bidding for assisting these enterprise customers.
See you on the 4th.
I expect that Nebraskans will be able to buy stuff directly from XStreetSL.
Coyle,
As the official LL blog states:
“Nebraska’ is the much-anticipated behind-the-firewall solution which will allow enterprise to host their own virtual world environments within their organizations”
This means *NOT* connected to the main grid, it’s going to be a stand alone solution.
From our own developments, this means no traffic in or out. It will run as it’s own space, no interaction with the wider SL eco-system. It will runs it’s own defined content and, a great example of this type of solution, Immersive Workspaces.
I cannot say much more, as a lot of information is under NDA. We’re also making an announcement on the same day, the 4th Nov, should be an interesting day.
I would though like to add. As it currently stands, OpenSim is a very different proposition. It’s a fantastic experimental space, for now anyway.
OpenSim is still an Alpha/Beta product. Also, a lot of Enterprises look to the SLA as basis of engagement. This means, the solution has to offer, accountability and support as a prerequisite.
Coyle:
You make some really valid points about ‘their own APIs’ although I’m not entirely clear what your examples might be.
The ones that occur to me personally include things like fully integrated artificial intelligence (bots that aren’t just hacked avatar accounts), tracking, and stuff with the physics. What else would a company want to do that they currently can’t?
The things I mentioned were my own Noob take on integration with log-in systems. Nebraska will clearly allow companies to let their employees log-in with whatever accounts they use internally. It’s not so much an “app” as making sure that you don’t need some separate registration system for avatars in an enterprise solution.
But seriously, the MediaAPI is a MUST HAVE. If you can pull Word documents in from internal servers, or a sales forecast, or pipe in data for visualization, it totally changes the game for what’s possible both in SL in general and Nebraska in particular.
Bottom line is when I say integration, I’m talking about the kind of integration that can only happen if you can hook the user database into existing systems, or hook the in-world content into existing databases. Examples would include:
- Sharepoint integration and ability to pull, review and revise documents directly in the environment
- LMS integration, for example with Blackboard and linked in to a school system’s student database
- Exchange and other calender integration like what Rivers has done with Immersive Workspaces where you can book a meeting room in a virtual room and it appears on your Outlook or whatever
- Google Wave integration when it comes
I’m really curious to hear what you mean, however, Coyle.
Oh – and Graham – I really do care about Qwak. Er, Teleplace. In fact, we’re a customer. It’s an incredibly useful app, especially for document sharing and review. I have some thoughts on their customer service and stuff, but that’s another post.
It’s just too bad they needed to re-brand although I’m happy they did…we wanted to use Qwak for some meetings with physicians but they wouldn’t log on to a system that reminded them that physicians are often called, um, quacks.
Another thing…
Having re-read the replies, I feel the need to comment further, especially as I believe we’re missing a vital issue:
Tools not Toys.
Again, from our own experience in this space, plus working with our great partner network. The clients are not looking for a “platform” they’re looking for the best “solution” for their needs and challenges.
Now, this may sound obvious, especially as we all know this is logical.
So why is this important?
Arguably, over the last three years, the features and functionality of the various platforms have dominated the majority of our conversations. About six months ago, the Enterprise sector finally seems to have realized the opportunities on offer by adopting Virtual Worlds as a ‘real space’ of work.
We feel this has come from the hard work of the other platform vendors, also the validation from Gartner, Forrester and other analysts. They’ve all beaten a well-trodden path, I believe LL’s entry into the space is an important validation: something that will benefit everyone.
Enterprise is now asking us for a business led SOLUTON. With non-technology based departments asking us for consultancy and strategic recommendation for various challenges: retail design systems, immersive meeting systems, data visualization, planograms, healthcare training… to name but a few.
A fact for you: Google Wave is not going to be adopted at an a Enterprise level. Not in the way that corporations currently run their operations. (of course, this might change, but not today or in the mid-term).
The important point: This is not a technology issue. It’s about a SOLUTION. Yes, I know. I’m using that a word a lot today. But I hope you get my point, the issue is not about individual related issues like MediaAPI and content etc. It’s about how all that is ‘packaged’ up and presented to the client. A client may not be a ‘technology evangelist’, this is a marked difference to the past. When the “evangelist” was the commissioner of projects. The era of just tinkering is passing. Virtual Worlds are starting to go mainstream, crossing over and becoming real tools.
The secret? Adapting and working with popular Enterprise tools used within the main corporations. Or developing bespoke solutions that deliver results and reduce associated costs.
A recent Enterprise engagement created the following as the criteria for selection:
Accountability: a secure and safe environment, the solution hosted within the client’s own firewall.
Relevance: Designed for business and developed as a business tool and a real business led opportunity, the ability to share and create proprietary content and data.
Support: Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, with a Service Level Agreement. An understanding of where the solution is heading, a detailed road map.
Costing: A strategic understanding of the revenue commitments, return on investment opportunities and the commitment of cost implications needed on an internal level (IT integration cost, change management etc.)
Strategy: The commissioned developer has the depth; scalability to support and strategically understanding the clients needs and be proactive on their behalf. They also have the dedicated staff levels and facilities to support the proposal. The developer has the experience, the solution and a ‘bricks and mortar’ commitment. A trading history of accounts of at least 3/5 years to be submitted. A detailed account of the key personnel associated and dedicated for this projects life cycle.
I agree with Dusan’s “Innovation and invention isn’t going to happen so easily behind the firewall: it will happen in the often messy and chaotic world which is Second Life.”
Many griefers and porn addicts are just much more creative, and much better at design and coding, than most people in corporate IT. It is a well known fact of life.
I also agree with Justin: corporate IT departments want solutions without headaches.
This probably means that most corporations may prefer the Nebraska solution, or whatever it will be called, but developers will need to stay in the open SL to tap the innovation stream.
Being a SysAdmin for an enterprise level corporation myself, I have to agree on the need for integration the way Dusan described it: integrate with existing enterprise authentication, communication and collaboration systems. The easier it is to plug in the existing infrastructure, the cheaper it gets and the easier it becomes to get approval for a pilot. Imho, that not ‘yawn’ but ‘must have’.
On OpenSim: I’m an OpenSim user and have been for quite a while. But when talking about it at companies, I’ve been told, several times, that an open source product that still claims to be at an alpha stage of code maturity isn’t going to be an easy sell in a corporate environment: no formal organisation or support channels and not as established like Firefox or Open Office. I like OpenSim, but larger corporations will most likely go with Nebraska first.
Dusan on Qwaq now Teleplace: “It’s just too bad they needed to re-brand although I’m happy they did”
I also loved the former name Qwaq but…
One of the companies I am associated with is a reseller and in many meetings with business users we found that many couldn’t take the (really excellent) platform seriously because of the name. Teleplace sounds much more businesslike.