IBM and Linden Labs, creator of the Second Life virtual world, announced Thursday that they are developing tools for enterprise-quality virtual worlds. The goal is to solve a key problem for enterprises that want to use the avatar-based environment: the need to cross back and forth across a corporate firewall.

IBM will tryout an approach that will allow users to traverse both the public Second Life “mainland” and IBM’s custom-built world behind a firewall — without having to log on and off.

The solutions are based on the Second Life Grid, Linden’s platform that allows organizations to create private worlds.

‘Major Milestone’

“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,” IBM said.

Colin Parris, IBM vice president for digital convergence, said the company sees a “need for an enterprise-ready solution that offers

the same content-creation capabilities but adds new levels of safety measure and scalability.” With security-rich additions, custom virtual environments can become a “viable option for enterprises,” he added.

“Deploying regions of the Second Life Grid behind IBM’s firewall is a major milestone in the evolution of the Net and will help accelerate the growth and adoption of all virtual worlds,” said Ginsu Yoon, Linden Labs’ vice president of business affairs.

Extending Familiar Tools

But is there really a place for the fun and games of virtual worlds in a fast-paced business environment? Definitely, said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, in an e-mail. Second Life can be a “simple extension of common collaborative tools in use at many companies,” he said.

IBM’s Lotus suite, for example, supports collaboration features ranging from Facebook-style employee profiles to instant messaging to online meetings to instant-dial VOIP telephony, King said. “The Second Life technology simply…

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