Can you give us an update on some of IBM's virtual world activities?
IBM's has been exploring and experimenting with the application of virtual world business models and technologies in areas such as commerce, collaboration, education, training & events and process management and rehearsal. We see incredible potential for the 3D Internet to transform customer experiences, improve business processes, enrich commerce and transactions, and to use virtual worlds and simulation to educate both customers, as well as to train and educate your employees.
Right now IBM is applying 3D Internet thinking across the entire human capital management "life cycle", where people are the center of our focus. There are essentially four parts to the HCM lifecycle – Attract and Retain(new employees), Motivate and Develop, Connect and Enable and Deploy and Manage employees. At each step in this process we are applying 3D Internet thinking and finding ways to bridge gaps across our global community.
Our CIO office has a wide range of initiatives to enable training and education, team building and collaboration across our global community of employees. Trying to 'make the world smaller' as it were.
In the area of training, IBM Research in Almaden is working on something we call "rehearsal services". Within IBM, we do a lot of complex client engagements and it turns out that some our employees in field go to quite a length to find ways to rehearse the activities in advance of the actual engagement - but it always typically done as one-off exercise, with no support from anywhere to make their preparation more efficient or replicable. So we wondered if we could create an environment where people could practice complex sales or project management interactions ahead of time. For one group, we built a rehearsal environment for practicing "extreme project management" for complex project management, like what is needed for ERP implementation. It is a totally immersive experience where we use a combination of a virtual company we created that include manufacturing, corporate headquarter and a view of production and sales data which changes throughout the scenario) and in-world facilitators – actors who play parts through use of avatars in the virtual world-- to take the team through a project management exercise. If the team asks the right questions and uncovers the true business drivers (and what needs to be done to improve the company's bottom line), the company thrives. If not, the company's revenues go down. We are building similar "rehearsal studios" for some of our sales teams.
There's been talk at the conference about IBM finding a way to merge instant messaging – a communications medium already widely understood – with virtual worlds, which are perhaps not so well understood. Perhaps you could talk a little more about this?
In September, IBM Research announced a project we called "Sametime 3-D," This is a great example of how we are looking at ways to enhance business value of virtual environments through unified communications. Our vision is to foster innovation and business agility by making it easier for people to find, connect to and collaborate with one another through a unified communications experience -- right from their familiar devices, applications, and processes.
So what does this mean- well in the prototype, a user can instant message a colleague and instead of only chatting with one another, they can launch into an immersive 3-D environment directly from within the SameTime chat session. "Sametime 3-D" creates a virtual meeting space 'on demand' – in the prototype the user is launched into an OpenSim environment, but we are working with other partners to provide similar capabilities. Forterra, for example has already enabled this capability for its Olive platform. As the 3-D meeting space is launched, people have the option to attach files, select a meeting space type and sign in using their existing enterprise authentication tools. We are developing some in world tools to help facilitate the meeting activity, and will be working with a few clients to pilot this capability.
Another project IBM's been working on in virtual worlds is the virtual data centre – what's the motivation behind that?
Oh yes, this is really great project, which Kevin Aires (AKA Boris) will be demoing in the "virtual camp" IBM created yesterday. Within our virtual business center, we have a Virtual Green Data Center. It provides visitors with the ability to easily access the "inside workings" of a data center, understand complex concepts and processes related to green technology, and gives us the opportunity to do customer briefings and sales team education with no travel expenses (how green is that!?). The exhibit allows visitors to learn how to manage and improve their data center energy efficiency and is available any time from anywhere, with a computer and an internet connection. Visitors are able to explore the Virtual Green Data Center by taking a self-guided, individual, or group tour. The business center itself is staffed by live sales avatars twenty-four hours a day, five days a week, making it easier for visitors to get the information and answers they need.
What are some of the other interesting business applications you are seeing?
Another area of great promise where we are already working with a number of clients on is complex systems management. In particular in the area of 3-D Data Centers. In these projects we use advanced visualization technology to recreate an entire data center or centers in-world.
The 3D datacenter application places users in an immersive environment with familiar 3D datacenter equipment- servers, power equipment and displays. The 3D datacenter provides a mirror image of an IT environment, but it is more that that. The models receive data from live enterprise management tools residing on the equipment, By aggregating information from these management systems and presenting it in a familiar 3D space, managers are able to respond quickly to alerts and events on demand. Also, since the 3D datacenter is a multi-user virtual world, users can effectively collaborate on elements of the datacenter together. While the 3D datacenter application can be used to manage real datacenters, it can also be used as a modeling and simulation tool. One interesting outcome of this is that clients realized that the virtual data center does not have to have the exact same layout as their real data centers- for example similar equipment located in different physical locations can be put together virtually, if that makes sense to them, so they visualize the collective set of enterprise resources and their individual states, for multiple physically distributed datacenters.
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