Video tour of ThinkBalm’s Distillery — an immersive technology selection experience

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

In January, we published a ThinkBalm Immersive Internet analyst report, The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide. This report is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In February, we launched “the Distillery,” an immersive technology selection experience built around the concepts in the report. Our intention with the Distillery is to replace the boring ole’ webinar with an engaging, interactive activity, and create an unforgettable immersive learning experience.

Here is a 9-minute mini video tour of the Distillery lead by ThinkBalm analyst Erica Driver. Note that you can also visit the Distillery yourself first-hand; here is the Second Life URL (SLURL).

To develop The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide, we held structured briefings with nineteen enterprise immersive software vendors (list here) and conducted interviews with fifteen early adopters who were involved in the technology selection process in their organizations. In the report, we present “if/then” scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training.

While grain mash is processed and distilled to make whiskey, ThinkBalm’s technology selection process helps business and technology decision makers winnow their vendor options from dozens down to just a few.

1. Stop 1 on the tour is the Options Vat, where we discuss core business questions.
2. Stop 2 is the Requirements Room, where we lead participants through a discussion about the features and functions needed to satisfy the most common use cases: small meetings, large meetings and conferences, and learning and training.
3. Stop 3 is the Filter Tower, where we discuss important limiting factors like security concerns, system integration requirements, scalability requirements, and technology prerequisites.
4. The final stop is the Recommendations Room.

Enjoy the video tour! And do let us know if you have any questions or could use a hand with the immersive technology selection process in your organization.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Linden Lab’s Second Life Viewer 2 Beta – what does it mean for business users?

By Sam Driver.

On February 23, 2010, Linden Lab announced the release of their Second Life Viewer 2 Beta program. The viewer is a downloaded application that creates the connection between your computer and the public virtual world of Second Life. The changes built into this new viewer improve the user interface (UI), making it easier to navigate and communicate in the environment, and to add some critical functionality (Shared Media).

As one of the most well known tools for immersive work, Second Life is where most business users first experienced a virtual world. The technology evolved from a recreational virtual world into a cosmopolitan environment that serves many types of users. From a business perspective, the DIY capabilities for building and animating 3D content have been a great boon for experiments and pilots performed by technology enthusiasts. As early adopters tried to bring this technology to a broader audience at work, they ran into a few hurdles: the UI was very complex, and the dizzying world around a new user could be overwhelming. (For more information see the Sept. 23, 2009 ThinkBalm report, Crossing the Chasm, One Implementation at a Time.)

The success of early experiments at work has led to a large collection of other technology vendors (list here) that design immersive technology application and content for work. This design gap represents a challenge for Linden Lab to remain competitive in a small and crowded market. The release of this new viewer is an important step toward making Second Life a modern and streamlined business tool.

Pressure on all of the vendors in this space is toward a simpler user experience, to appeal to the broadest array of potential users. We’ve defined some of the factors that are important to consider when you select an appropriate technology for your use case (See the January 19^th, 2010 ThinkBalm report, The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide). Resolving two of these factors, ease of use and core functionality, can often be difficult because they run counter to each other: if you want a lot of functionality, you’ll need controls, and more controls means more complexity. Finding the balance between these two is like trying to hit a moving target. As more capabilities become available, the market wants them, but in many cases, development won’t be backward compatible, so we see major version changes that can disrupt content or investments in earlier versions.

Our take: We see the release of Viewer 2 Beta and the Shared Media capability as fundamental improvements for work-related use of Second Life. Co-browsing the web and web-embedded media have been standard features of many tools for a year. There are still some features missing, and some web collaboration may be difficult due to synchronization issues. However, this is a typical approach for Linden Lab: they often build core content and rely on partners to develop additional content, applications and other assets. We expect that common document formats will be supported over time, either in the core product, or through third party developers. Feedback during the Beta period will drive a lot of this development.

• Many people will find Viewer 2 easier to use than previous versions. Personally, we find that Viewer 2 is a much easier UI than previous versions. The context for controls is more modern and in keeping with web style. The visual separation of public communication from private is a great addition as well. Fewer buttons at first glance make adoption by new users less intimidating, but all of the capabilities for power users are there, and in many cases, are more streamlined or easy to use.
• New Shared Media feature is a step forward. Shared Media and drag-and-drop web addresses on objects in Second Life is a tremendous upgrade from third-party tools or the dreaded image file upload process. There are still some steps to get content up on the web and in a format that will work in Second Life, but from there, drag-and-drop works. This is a stumbling block for many business users who don’t know how to upload content properly, or are prevented by corporate security restrictions. While application development is already underway by partners in the Second Life ecosystem, the prospect of managing third-party IP and assets has implications from purchasing policies to help desk support: large-scale deployments will have to factor in costs associated with these issues.
• You can still do everything you could do before — which is both good and bad. Viewer 2 Beta and Shared Media haven’t changed the nature of Second Life. As one of the few environments that allows end-user object creation within the environment, there is a layer of complexity that will complicate the UI. Use case and business needs will drive this decision: if you need user-generated content, you’ll have to accept a more complex tool. For those use cases where user-created content is an important consideration, the streamlined viewer and new web media capabilities are a great addition. The business model that supports Second Life results in a complex ecosystem of content developers that charge for their IP in many different ways, and the resulting permission system designed to protect these assets can be a major problem for end users.

Overall, we see this announcement as a healthy sign that the technology vendors are continuing to refine their products to suit user demand and incorporate rapidly advancing technology. For example, we saw a major upgrades to Teleplace (V3.0) and 3DXplorer (V5) in the second half of 2009, and the introduction of Forterra Meeting Labs prior to the acquisition of Forterra by SAIC. We expect further technology improvement announcements from Linden Lab and others in 2010.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Without financial backing, Project Wonderland’s future is in question

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.                                                                                     

At the end of January, Project Wonderland development lead Nicole Yankelovich broke the news that Oracle would no longer be applying development resources to the Project Wonderland enterprise immersive software platform. (For more information about Project Wonderland see the January 19, 2010 ThinkBalm report, The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide.) Oracle laid off most if not all of the Project Wonderland team, which was part of Sun Labs.

In the last few weeks, we spoke with Nicole Yankelovich as well as executives from three small companies Yankelovich cited as third-party software vendors or service providers that offer software products or custom solutions based on Wonderland: Amphisocial, Green Phosphor, and Indusgeeks. Yankelovich is currently working with the open source community to establish a non-profit organization and is pursuing a vision of creating a vibrant ecosystem where third parties can create Wonderland content and contribute to the platform — where people can even distribute entire virtual worlds. But many aspects of Project Wonderland’s future are up in the air.

Our take:

• Oracle’s move to cut Wonderland funding wasn’t altogether surprising . . . Oracle uses immersive software for some internal and customer-facing events – the company has held conferences like Oracle Developer Day and Oracle Enterprise 2.0 online using virtual event platform Unisfair. But the company does not have immersive technology in its product portfolio and has not been a part of the Immersive Internet discourse to date. And in general, we don’t think of Oracle as a company that has a strong history in developing experimental new technology in-house. Instead, Oracle tends to make acquisitions to flesh out its product portfolio.
• . . . Though a role exists for immersive technology in Oracle’s portfolio. With Oracle’s focus on enterprise applications, middleware, and now hardware (with the Sun acquisition), opportunities exist to incorporate immersive technology into the company’s portfolio, thereby massively differentiating Oracle products in the market and helping customers decrease their costs and increase user engagement. Some of Oracle’s opportunities include incorporating immersive technology into Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, for 3D data visualization, and into products like Oracle Beehive or Oracle Communications Converged Application Server, for next-generation unified communications solutions.
• This action does not shed much light on Oracle’s perspective on immersive technology. Oracle may have made the decision to cut funding for Project Wonderland for a variety of reasons. Project Wonderland was an open source project, not a revenue-generating software product; no model was in place for deriving revenue from it. Perhaps Wonderland didn’t have traction in the markets Oracle most wants to pursue — though Wonderland had achieved its greatest traction in the education sector, which is one of the industries Oracle serves. Or it could be that immersive technology is simply too early-stage to pique the interest of the strategists at Oracle.
• Unless Project Wonderland finds another major backer, it will not remain competitive. The core Wonderland project team is working to secure new backing. If the team can pull together a funded organization, then Wonderland may have a bright future. If, however, the core team move on to new full-time positions, then the outlook for Wonderland is grim. Without development resources devoted to the project, Wonderland will be slow to add new core features and functionality. It will be up to third-party software developers, like Amphisocial, to add new features through Wonderland’s module layer. Without backing for Wonderland’s core development team, the project’s competitors — both open source and commercial — will catch up in areas where Wonderland is currently strong, like security features, platform independence, Java support, and audio/video capabilities.
• Loss of major backing has eroded confidence in the Wonderland platform. While Yankelovich said that Wonderland supporters — particularly in the education sector — have stepped up to donate hardware and other resources to the project, these donations aren’t enough to fund substantial new development, marketing, and project coordination. Sid Banerjee of Indusgeeks summed it up this way: “While no big company is backing Wonderland, it would be difficult for Wonderland to compete as an enterprise grade platform. Though we still believe it can thrive as an open source platform for the education sector.”
• Further consolidation is inevitable in this emerging technology market. At the beginning of February, SAIC announced that it had acquired Forterra OLIVE (see ThinkBalm’s posts about it here and here). The market is filling with an increasing number of enterprise immersive software products — we are covering nearly two dozen. We sized the enterprise immersive software market at $50M USD in 2009 — too small to support such a large number of vendors.[1] The business decision maker’s job is hard enough when adopting new technology. Consolidation in the market is inevitable and necessary. There are simply too many vendors in this space for business decision makers to easily choose appropriate technologies.

For Java shops that want to engage in low-cost experimentation, Project Wonderland continues to remain a solid enterprise immersive platform. But given Project Wonderland’s current state of upheaval, we recommend that business and technology decision makers looking for software for a pilot or production approach Project Wonderland with caution unless and until Project Wonderland receives substantial backing.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

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[1] This conservative number includes only revenue from software licenses and maintenance fees, appliance sales, and subscription fees collected from customers who were using the software for work (as opposed to recreational uses). We did not include revenue from professional services (e.g., custom development projects and implementation services). For more information, see the January 19, 2010 ThinkBalm report, The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide.

Coming up: ThinkBalm Innovation Community’s problem-solving session #1

by Erica Driver.

Next week, the ThinkBalm Innovation Community will experiment with a new event format: a problem-solving session (details here). Two members of the community will each have about 20 minutes to present an Immersive Internet-related problem they are working on and get input from other participants. We expect about a dozen and a half community members — all Immersive Internet advocates, implementers, explorers and technology marketers — to participate in this event. Participants will collaborate together in an immersive environment (we will meet in ThinkBalm’s Teleplace environment) to increase their first-hand experience with immersive technology and collectively build the body of knowledge about how virtual worlds, immersive learning environments, and virtual event platforms can benefit business. 

Part I: Laura Handrick, VP of Innovation at The Maids International

Laura Handrick, VP of Innovation at The Maids International will share a bit about what her team is working on and will pose the following questions for discussion:

1. How can a virtual learning space be used to entice / encourage / inspire management to replicate best practices in the real world?
2. What kinds of scripted objects should we create that are unique to our business (such as our proprietary back-pack vacuum)?
3. What kinds of giveaways might inspire visitors to return? Should we create virtual uniforms that hang on a rack that anyone visiting is free to wear?
4. How much security should we have?  We’re in a business with competitors, but not too worried that they will steal our ideas by visiting our virtual world space. However, once we begin to provide video programs, manuals, etc., we’ll have to prevent them from being replicated.

Part II: Richard Hackathorn, founder and president of Bolder Technology, Inc.

Richard Hackathorn, founder and president of Bolder Technology, Inc. will share some thoughts about Immersive Intelligence, which is a collaborative data-driven decision process for understanding complex systems using immersive spaces. To explore and mature the concept of Immersive Intelligence, he will raise the following questions for discussion:

1. What are the use cases? Expected business benefits? Unique contributions?
2. What is the architecture? How should a virtual world interact with a massive database?
3. How can millions of objects be created that convey rich visualization of the underlying data?
4. How do you visualize complex analytics acting on the base data?
5. What are some good current examples that illustrate key concepts?
6. How do we weave the collaborative elements into data visualization? To make decisions?
7. How do we engage people from the arts, architecture, sciences, etc?
8. How should we organize an open community? Financial model?

If you are an Immersive Internet advocate, implementer, explorer, or technology marketer and are interested in participating in this or future ThinkBalm Innovation Community events, we invite you to request membership in our LinkedIn group. You can find more info here.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

SAIC/Forterra acquisition: what it means for the enterprise immersive software market

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

On February 1, 2010, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) announced that it had acquired the OLIVE product line from Forterra Systems. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SAIC had been working with Forterra on and off for the past six years and SAIC had been working with OLIVE internally for the past year and a half. Moving forward, the company plans to offer OLIVE solutions to customers, as well as to use it internally.

On February 4^th, we spoke with executives at SAIC about the acquisition. Our takeaways are:

• SAIC’s industry focus for OLIVE will be government, energy, health, and other commercial markets. SAIC’s focus on these industries closely mirrors the industry focus Forterra had — so we don’t expect the OLIVE customer mix to change much in 2010. SAIC also says it will continue to work with channel partners with whom Forterra had relationships. Forterra had regional resellers in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as associations with companies like ACS Learning Services, Lockheed Martin, and Carahsoft.
• The primary internal and external use cases will be training and business activity rehearsal. SAIC has a long history in modeling and simulation, going back two decades. The company’s primary customer, the US government, has been putting increasing training emphasis on the interpersonal realm. OLIVE fills a gap in SAIC’s existing modeling and simulation offerings: strong support for interpersonal interaction. OLIVE gives SAIC a collaborative, multiuser 3D immersive environment. SAIC has already integrated OLIVE with systems like the US Army’s OneSAF^TM (One Semi Automated Forces) simulation solution. The company is likely to integrate OLIVE with additional systems moving forward.

What it means for business decision makers

As we have detailed in the past here and here, the enterprise immersive software market is still emerging and 2010 will be a year of churn. We see the acquisition of Forterra Systems by SAIC as a positive step in the maturation of the market. While it is difficult for those who are personally involved, the industry will benefit from having a smaller number of stable, well-capitalized technology providers.

• OLIVE just gained momentum in government and military and has promise in health and energy. Now offered by SAIC, a Fortune 500 company, OLIVE has a better shot than ever of penetrating the government and military sectors. If SAIC chooses to fully develop market opportunities in the energy and health sectors, OLIVE will remain a formidable competitor to products like American Research Institute’s PowerU, Linden Lab’s Second Life Enterprise, Teleplace’s Teleplace, and ProtonMedia’s ProtoSphere
• As with any acquisition, change is inevitable. Given that the acquisition just closed this week, many open questions remain. Existing and prospective OLIVE customers should keep an eye out for changes to product pricing, packaging, and status (e.g., Meeting Labs was a new hosted offering from Forterra and its future is unclear), as well as SAIC’s relationships with Forterra’s channel partners (some of which compete directly with SAIC). 

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Video: ThinkBalm analyst Sam Driver’s guest appearance on Metanomics

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

On February 3, 2010, Sam Driver was a guest on the Metanomics show, hosted by Robert Bloomfield. Sam was invited onto the show to discuss social networking, immersive media and the importance of community in a digital world. A large focus of the interview was on the research reports ThinkBalm publishes — in particular our most recent report, The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide. Sam also discussed the ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which has a mission of advancing adoption of work-related use of the Immersive Internet — virtual worlds and campuses, virtual event platforms, immersive learning environments, and 3D collaboration tools. The ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which now has nearly 420 members, has evolved into a mix between a social network, collaborative laboratory and guild.

Here’s the video recording of Sam’s interview.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Images from ThinkBalm Innovation Community’s un-lecture no. 6

by Erica Driver.

On January, 29, 2010 we held a ThinkBalm Innovation Community event titled ”Un-Lecture no. 6.” An un-lecture is an event during which four ThinkBalm Innovation Community members deliver 10-minute presentations about an Immersive Internet project on which they have been working. These events are a terrific way for enterprise immersive software early adopters to learn about possibilities and good practices, and to network. For more insight into the un-lecture format, see the January 14, 2009 ThinkBalm Storytelling Series report, End Death-by-Lecture: Tours, Not Speeches.

We held Un-Lecture no. 6 in ThinkBalm’s Avaya web.alive environment, at thinkbalm.projectchainsaw.com. Our presenters were:

• Joe Rigby, market manager, MellaniuM Inc. While this un-lecture utilized just the basic meeting functionality of Avaya web.alive, the technology can be used to create graphically rich scenes and environments. Joe Rigby showed examples his organization has built, leveraging content created outside web.alive, and shared insights into what was involved.
• Ariella Furman, CEO and machinimatographer, ALM Productions. Ariella is starting to see corporate clients using machinima as an alternative to traditional film production. She took us through the steps of creating corporate movies in a virtual world, highlighting the ways machinima allows film makers to do things they can’t do in the physical world — like imitate complicated camera moves and create visual effects. Here is a link to a commercial ALM Productions created for There.com and here is a link to a short movie for IBM.
• Ann Cudworth, production designer and virtual world creator, CBS Television and principal and lead designer with VSETS. Ann shared her career experiences transitioning from traditional set design to virtual set design. You can see examples of her work at Alchemy Sims in Second Life.
• John Kinsella, VP with PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors). John is a vice president at PADI, where he is responsible for – among other things – Dive World, which is PADI’s Immersive Internet presence in Second Life. John told us about his current project, which ties Dive World to scuba diver education (PADI’s core mission). PADI has created an accurate and realistic simulation of a scuba diving decompression computer. Participants can use it to learn what to expect on an actual scuba dive. Here is a link to a video about this new PADI project.

To attend future ThinkBalm Innovation Community events, please join our group on LinkedIn.

Thanks to Chris Hardy of Avaya for these snapshots.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Highlights from “Learning in 3D” book: steps to successful adoption

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

Karl Kapp, professor and consultant at Bloomsburg University, and Tony O’Driscoll, professor of the practice at Duke University, have a new book out titled Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration. ThinkBalm contributed an essay to Chapter 8, which is all about steps to successful enterprise adoption. We’d like to call out and comment on a few points from this chapter.

First: mainstream adoption is not a matter of if, but when. Kapp and O’Driscoll write, “There was a time when computers themselves were thought of as toys or novelties; now these devices are indispensable business and education tools. There was a time when the Internet was not a part of our daily lives. It’s hard to reach back and remember the time before these technologies became ubiquitous — when the same type of implementation and adoption concerns existed for those technologies [as for the Immersive Internet].” ThinkBalm’s prediction is that in three years’ time, adoption of immersive software in the workplace will have reached the early majority adoption phase. (See the November, 2008 ThinkBalm report, The Immersive Internet: Make Tactical Moves Today for Strategic Advantage Tomorrow). To be sure, the path to mainstream adoption is marked by barriers — but early adopters are finding springboards for overcoming hurdles. (See the September, 2009 ThinkBalm report, Crossing the Chasm, One Implementation at a Time.)

Second, Kapp and O’Driscoll offer great advice to early adopters in this chapter and we’d like to call out a couple of highlights:

• Focus on compatibility with existing technology and modes of work. In a discussion about how to make immersive technologies attractive to target stakeholders and users, Kapp and O’Driscoll say, “Positioning virtual immersive environments as a natural extension and convergence of existing technologies such as synchronous learning tools, video games, Web 2.0, and social networking — and not as a science-fiction-dream-come-to-life will go a long way toward the concept of compatibility.” Think of immersive software for meetings or learning and training as expansions of the worker’s toolkit. Immersive software will extend the reach of current investments with new features and functionality. One of the ways this will occur is through integration with existing communication and collaboration tools. (See the January 6, 2010 ThinkBalm blog post, “Immersive software for meetings will expand the information worker toolkit.”)
• Choose the right group of people to participate in a pilot. An immersive software pilot project is a test run during which people conduct real business activities in the environment and report feedback about their experiences to the project team. Kapp and O’Driscoll offer good advice about how to assemble the right pilot group. They recommend choosing a relatively small group; creating a mix of people who are comfortable with technology and those who are less comfortable; involving people from IT as well as legal and regulatory departments from the beginning; selecting people who are interested in the potential of virtual worlds; and focusing on people who will be willing to share their feedback with the project team.

This blog post is part of the Learning in 3D blog book tour. Book publisher Wiley is offering a 20% discount to blog book tour attendees. To buy the book and get your discount, click here and enter the code L3D1.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Enterprise immersive software trends for 2010

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

Enterprise immersive software is a collection of collaboration, communication, and productivity tools unified via a 3D or pseudo-3D visual environment. In this computer-generated environment, one or more people can engage in work activities such as training, rehearsing business activities, delivering or attending presentations, collaborating on documents, brainstorming, visualizing data, building or testing prototypes, and attending conferences and trade shows. The software provides a shared, interactive, multichannel experience through presence awareness, voice chat, active speaker indication, text chat, and many other features, often including avatars. The software can be installed behind the firewall, delivered on a hardware appliance, or accessed via a software as a service (SaaS) offering.

The term “enterprise” in the category name indicates that solutions are suitable for use in the workplace, as opposed to recreational use (e.g., consumer video games and recreational virtual worlds), and are scalable, secure, and stable enough for at least some work-related use cases. Because the enterprise immersive software market grew out of four distinct ancestral origins (virtual worlds, serious games, business applications, and learning simulations), the software products in the category vary widely in features and functionality.

ThinkBalm’s predictions for 2010:

1. The market will remain in the early adopter phase. The enterprise immersive software market has passed through the innovator phase, when nearly everyone who was experimenting with the technology was a technologist or virtual world enthusiast. In contrast, the bulk of the attention today is from early-adopter business people in functions like sales and marketing, human resources, and learning and training, as well as IT. We expect the market to remain in this phase until approximately 2013, when it will transition to the early majority adoption phase. This transition and timing assumes the industry is successfully able to “cross the chasm,” in Geoffrey Moore’s parlance.[1]
2. Cash will be king. Enterprise immersive software vendors made significant strides in 2009 in features and functionality, scalability, and stability of their offerings. New and updated products emerged every quarter. While vendors will continue to improve their offerings in 2010, a focus on financing may curb the pace of change temporarily. Many of the vendors in this small, volatile market are actively seeking outside funding. Not all will receive the investment they require to reach their target customers or even continue operations. Executives will be out on the road, raising money and trying to encourage customers to move pilots to paid-for production deployments.
3. The year will be marked by churn. We expect 2010 to be a busy year, with new entrants, mergers, acquisitions, and even some business closures. Most of the enterprise immersive software vendors are small. Avaya, IBM, and Sun Microsystems are larger players, but their immersive software project teams are no bigger than those of the small vendors in this space. In 2010, new vendors will enter the market and some vendors that are undercapitalized will exit, often through acquisition. Product life-cycle management (PLM) vendors are keeping an eye on this emerging market as a natural extension of computer-aided design and prototyping. Unified communications (UC) vendors are also keeping an eye on — or getting involved in, in the case of Avaya — the market. For UC vendors, immersive software could be a new way to deliver unification of services.
4. Implementations will break out of the experiment-and-pilot ghetto. In April of 2009, we conducted a small survey of Immersive Internet advocates and implementers and found that about 2/3 of projects in 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 were what we call pre-production: early experiments or pilots.[2] In the same survey, nearly 75% of respondents (47 of 64) said their organizations either might or will increase their investment in immersive technologies in 2009 and 2010. In 2010, we expect to see more large-scale production deployments follow on the heels of 2009’s trend setters. In September of 2009, Cisco Systems held its annual sales kickoff meeting online using a virtual event platform, with 19,000 attendees.[3] IBM’s CIO office has a vision of deploying immersive technology to the entire workforce — that’s nearly 400,000 people. And BP extended its 2009 Game Changer program, which has been focused on the Immersive Internet, for an additional six months because the company was seeing so much value from it.
5. A wave of products will move from alpha and beta into general release. While some vendors could emulate Google and offer beta products in perpetuity, most of the vendors that have early-stage products will take a more traditional route and move their enterprise immersive software products from alpha or beta into production this year. In 2010, we expect to see generally-available (GA) products released by A World for Us, Amphisocial, Avaya (assuming the company moves forward with web.alive, which it has acquired with Nortel), Linden Lab (Second Life Enterprise), VastPark, and VenueGen. We may also see a GA release of Meeting Labs, if Forterra Systems moves forward with this new hosted offering.
6. Customers will demand more integration with existing systems. Some of the vendors already provide interfaces to various back-end business systems. Several vendors provide lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) integration: Altadyn, Avaya, IBM, Forterra, Linden Lab (with Second Life Enterprise), ReactionGrid (with Harmony), Sun Microsystems, and Virtual Italian Parks. ProtonMedia and Teleplace also integrate specifically with Microsoft Active Directory. Another common integration point is office productivity software. A World for Us, Amphisocial, Avaya, Forterra Systems, ProtonMedia, Rivers Run Red, and Teleplace allow users to upload or drag and drop Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, Google documents and spreadsheets, or other types of files into the environment. American Research Institute (ARI), Forterra Systems, and ProtonMedia commonly integrate with their customers’ learning management systems. Amphisocial, InXpo, ON24, Unisfair, and VastPark provide integration with external social networking tools, like LinkedIn and Twitter.
7. The base feature set for the most common use cases will begin to standardize. Because the enterprise immersive software market grew out of multiple distinct ancestral origins, the software products in the category vary widely in features and functionality.[4] Despite this, we are starting to see a standard feature set emerge for small, presentation-style meetings, which is the simplest use case. All of the products that address this use case provide meeting spaces, local text chat, and either file sharing or screen sharing. Most also provide 3D meeting spaces, 3D avatars, and local voice chat. In 2010 and beyond, vendors will coalesce around a richer set of features for this use case and fairly standard sets of core capabilities for other use cases, primarily small, collaborative meetings, large meetings and conferences, and some forms of learning and training.
8. Pricing models will go through a transformation. To date, most immersive software deployments are pilots – not large-scale production deployments. Most customers are not yet making large, strategic investments. As a result, vendors have not yet received much feedback from the market about pricing, and lots of experimentation is under way. Some products are open source and therefore free, if you don’t include the cost of building applications and supporting the environment. Some vendors charge based on number of concurrent or named users, while others charge per user, per hour. Some charge per month, others per year, still others per virtual event. Some charge a traditional up-front license fee plus an annual software maintenance fee. As the market evolves, pricing strategies will also evolve to align more closely with customers’ expectations of enterprise software, whether it is installed on-premise or delivered via a hosted service.
9. Early attempts at mobile device support will focus on a subset of features. With a few exceptions, enterprise immersive software products do little to support mobile users. A few vendors (like ARI, Forterra Systems, and Sun Microsystems) provide telephony integration so mobile users can join immersive meetings and training sessions via voice. Several third-party vendors have created iPhone apps (e.g., Sparkle IM and Touch Life) that are slimmed-down Second Life clients. VastPark is working on apps for the iPhone and Android. Other vendors are likely to provide mobile device support for their products, as well. The mobile applications will not likely have all the same functionality as the full apps, but at minimum will provide presence information text chat, and voice chat. With the rise in the tablet computer format in 2010, which will have a larger display than mobile phones and will have built-in support for broadband Internet and Wi-Fi, we expect to see some exploration into this new hardware category, as well.
10. New alliances will form, creating new value. We hope this is more than wishful thinking on our part. But wouldn’t it be nice if . . . enterprise immersive software vendors partnered up with unified communications vendors and virtual event platform vendors? We see many crossovers already between enterprise immersive software and unified communications. (See the January 6, 2010 ThinkBalm article, “Immersive software for meetings will expand the information worker toolkit.”) Imagine an immersion layer that presents a simple, natural user interface that truly unifies communication and collaboration among information workers. Also imagine alliances between vendors that offer 3D environments and those that offer pseudo-3D environments for large-scale events (e.g., InXpo, ON24, and Unisfair). You’d be able to augment the unfettered access provided by pseudo-3D environments for large-scale events with the collaborative power of 3D for smaller breakouts and training sessions.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

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[1] For the enterprise immersive software market to successfully cross from the early adopter phase to early majority, technology providers will have to address a number of issues. For more information see the May 26, 2009 ThinkBalm report, ThinkBalm Enterprise Immersive Internet Business Value Study, Q2 2009 and the September 23, 2009 ThinkBalm report, Crossing the Chasm, One Implementation at a Time.

[2] About a quarter of respondents (17 of 66) said their projects were production rollouts to the entire targeted population and 6% (4 of 66) said theirs were enterprisewide rollouts to many, if not all employees in the organization. See the May 26, 2009 ThinkBalm report, ThinkBalm Immersive Internet Business Value Study, Q2 2009.

[3] Cisco’s Global Sales Experience (GSX) event consisted of 88 hours of consecutive sessions across 24 time zones. The event resulted in 90% cost savings compared to holding a physical event. See the September 30, 2009 VirtualEdge.org article, “At 19,000, Cisco sets the new bar for business critical meetings and events.”

[4] The enterprise immersive software market has emerged out of five other categories: virtual worlds, serious games, business applications, virtual event platforms, and learning simulations. For more information see the November 17, 2008 ThinkBalm report, The Immersive Internet: Make Tactical Moves Today for Strategic Advantage Tomorrow.

Immersive software for meetings will expand the information worker toolkit

by Sam Driver.

Immersive software can deliver a similar level of engagement as a physical meeting or high-end telepresence session, without the requirement to travel. Enterprise immersive software vendors have suffered something of a catch-22 as they built products that show off the potential of immersive technology. They added tightly integrated communication and collaboration features, even though these features are redundant with existing information worker infrastructure. Immersive software features that are also part of more established information worker software include voice services, messaging (real-time and asynchronous), presence awareness, team workspaces, video streaming and sharing, and document and screen sharing. As more organizations adopt immersive software, the time will come to tackle one of the second-stage barriers we’ve discussed before: integrating these new capabilities into their existing software investments? We anticipate that integration will be a major focus of early adopters in 2010.

Immersive software for meetings will:

• Extend the reach of existing investments with new features and functionality. It is helpful to think about immersive technology as the front end of the wave of communications and collaboration tools, with an emphasis on engagement (see figure). Immersive software provides features other forms of information worker software don’t — like a 3D interface (in most cases), avatars (in most cases), unification of collaboration and communication services, more sophisticated non-verbal communication (e.g., gestures and animations), and a strong sense of presence. Immersive technology isn’t about replacement, but expanding and extending the toolkit. Immersive Internet advocates should try to position their investments in immersive software for meetings within the broader information worker infrastructure context.

• Integrate with existing communication and collaboration tools. We are starting to see vendors design or add function to their products to achieve integration with existing systems. For example: Amphisocial has built direct integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. ProtonMedia has integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Teleplace provides drag-and-drop integration with OpenOffice.org documents (and can provide this for Microsoft Office documents as well). Several vendors (ARI, Forterra, and Sun Microsystems) provide the ability to call a telephone from within the environment. Sun and VastPark provide a session initiation protocol (SIP) interface.

Recommendations

Think strategically about immersive software, focusing on filling in gaps and extending existing capabilities. Build a program that:

• Doesn’t try to force everything into an immersive environment just because it’s “cool.”
• Choose the right tool for the task at hand
• Look for ways to integrate immersive software with existing tools and technologies, thereby enabling people to interact regardless of which tools they have at hand
• Utilize existing tools that work well for 2D data analysis, asynchronous communication and quick voice chats
• Find new, engaging ways to fill the gap left by travel bans, connect remote workers, or start to work in novel ways, doing things you simply weren’t able to do any other way.

© 2010 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

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