IBM Second Life Unveiled

IBM will offer the Second Life virtual project for its employees to move freely between public and private areas.

IBM said on Wednesday it will launch a group project which will host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own servers.

The international company will be the first to offer a virtual world to its employees for collaboration and teleconferencing.

"We see a need for an enterprise-ready solution that offers the same content creation capabilities but adds new levels of security and scalability," Colin Parris, IBM's vice president for digital convergence, said.

The project, which is currently in testing, will go live within several weeks. It marks a new focus by Second Life's parent company, Linden Lab, on providing software and services to corporate customers who want to integrate virtual worlds.

Company employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas which are hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall, enabling them to host sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information. This will prevent the data from passing through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.

IBM has long been one of the corporations most engaged with Second Life, a popular virtual world with several hundred thousand regular users as well as its own currency and economy.

More than 6,000 IBM employees have created the Second Life characters called avatars, and the renowned company signed a pact with Linden Lab last year to explore interoperability between different virtual worlds.