Making The Second Life Connection

Sun Microsystems launched its Second Life presence last fall, building an island with all the accoutrements people in this virtual universe have come to expect -- meeting places, presentation centers, resource locators and product demonstrations. It's also in the middle of a major renovation.

"Our primary objective was simply to maintain a brand presence in Second Life. There are other objectives on the table now, such as creating a global training center for Sun products," says Don St. Mars, owner of St. Mars Entertainment Design and Marketing, the developer who built Sun's Second Life outpost.

Second Life is vastly different from even the most dynamic Web pages. In a sense, it's more akin to the bulletin boards of the early Internet, but far more interactive in terms of its ability to exchange information and collaborate.

"It's all very open and candid," says Chris Melissinos, Sun's chief gaming officer. "It's about having a direct conversation with the people who are driving the next generation of computer technology."

Vendors venturing into Second Life see tremendous potential for enabling and empowering their solution providers. Solution providers are already forming partnerships with peers they meet in Second Life, and vendors are able to reach a broader group of partners whom they could only previously touch through live events.

The next generation of Second Life will see the advancement of vendors and solution providers working together to develop products, the advent of solution provider contributions to vendor islands, and the use of Second Life to drive new channel sales opportunities through solution provider and end-user interaction.

In time, vendors hope their solution providers use their islands to build solution, showcase success stories and host their own events. The first step is building a content-rich environment that people want to visit.

"You have to do something that's compelling. Why would they come to Second Life when they can just go to the Web site and download the information when that's faster? It's because they want the interactive experience," says Cisco's Renaud.

Second Life is continuing to add capabilities, such as voice interaction (communications today are limited to text) and improving graphics. Each improvement will bring new capabilities for vendor-solution provider-customer interaction.

"Only a fool goes against Moore's Law on bandwidth and processing power," says UGS's Kelley.