Gartner Cools on Current Second Life for Business

Gartner is generally positive on virtual worlds: predicting that 20% of retailers will be involved with virtual worlds by 2010 and that 80% of Internet users will be in a virtual world by 2011. More generally, specific researchers like Vice President Steve Prentice and Principle Analyst Adam Sarner are very excited about the future of virtual worlds for business and personal use. That's all in the long term, though. Right now Gartner is warning businesses away from Second Life: ""Second Life is acceptable for pilots and prototypes,"  James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. "However, current technical issues would have a significant impact on any organisation that wanted to use it in a production environment, and we are advising companies to evaluate alternatives."

In June, Gartner predicted that 50% of governments worldwide would vacate Web 2.0 technologies, including virtual worlds, by 2010 due to a lack of control.

In August the company warned businesses away from public virtual worlds for many of the same reasons espoused by the then mounting mainstream media backlash against Second Life: IT security risks, brand management amidst the libertine attitude of virtual worlds, and anonymity.

Now it's looking specifically at the technology of Second Life:

Challenge One – Graphics Card Issues
One of Second Life's issues is desktop support. Second Life widely supports NVIDIA graphics cards and now certain ATI cards (but not all). This circumstance puts severe pressure on IT departments when a business unit decides that it wants to use Second Life. Not all business users will have access to a PC that is considered "gaming class." Gartner said that even in the same PC model from the same manufacturer, graphics cards can differ, and organizations need to examine this reality, especially as user experiences become more graphics-intensive.

Challenge Two – Downtime
While Second Life now notifies users in advance of planned downtime via a Google shared calendar, that calendar has been found to be somewhat out of date with limited warning of future planned outages or rolling restarts. Although casual users of Second Life have become used to this downtime dilemma, any organization that wishes to use it for business purposes, such as running training sessions, may have to delay or reschedule those sessions if loss of service occurs during these rolling restarts. These issues are usually intolerable for enterprises that expect 24/7 access, scalability and reliable, bug-free operation from their virtual environments.

Challenge Three – Other Platforms Emerge
Gartner expects that other, more scalable virtual environments will emerge to challenge Second Life in the consumer-facing segment and that Sony's forthcoming Home could be one of these challengers. By the end of 2009, Gartner predicts that because of continued technical issues, consumers and consumer-facing businesses will seek other virtual environments as alternatives to Second Life.

More and more technologies are emerging as alternatives for business use, though none has taken a clear lead yet as the best of breed for enterprise virtual worlds. For consumer alternatives, though, the currently delayed Home seems to have generated interest at least in part due to its name-brand backing from Sony.

Other than that, I'd say Gartner is a bit behind the times. Consumer-facing businesses are already looking at a variety of worlds based on market segmentation and demographic targeting. In fact, Nic Mitham of K Zero has already labeled Gaia Online as one of the strongest locations for brands. Linden Lab is responding, though, with the opportunity for businesses to brand their own private experiences on the Second Life Grid.

Will that be enough to change Gartner's mind by 2009?

Comments

[nic mitham]

The thing is, if businesses want to do business with the residents inside virtual worlds (and this is a major opportunity for real world co's) then you need to have a mass of people to interact with.

If Gartner is 'warning' businesses away from SL, then where are they redirecting them to? Which alternatives are they recommending?

Second Life's secret weapon:

http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=1954

[Dave Levinson]

Nic, you assume that businesses only want to market to users. There are dozens of ways to leverage virtual worlds including innovative collaboration, research, training and/or meetings. Casual users and residents are not required for any of these goals.

[Aleister Kronos]

ABN Amro (like Wells Fargo before them) rather fancy the look of Active Worlds. Personally, in my brief visit there, I was not impressed. But it is a growing contender.

And the wise man will look long & hard at what emerges out of the Chinese CRD initiative.

[Matt Mihaly]

Not to mention the fact that Second Life is a terrible platform for outside businesses to market to users to begin with.

[nic mitham]

Hey Dave. I agree - there's many many uses for virtual worlds. I was just making a point in the context of business opps in-world.

[len]

Gartner isn't warning them away. They are advising them to weigh risks vs opportunities. The demographics of the world are more important than the raw numbers of people there. If the business can make sales or get leads in SL, set up shop, but don't do it for the sake of being bleeding edge. The net result of that is loss of blood.

For businesses that only want to set up for a meeting or a conference, they are better off going to a vendor like Trevor Smith who leases time and services and contracts for high QOS reliability.