Breaking: Nortel entering Enterprise Virtual World market

Nortel has been stealthy about their virtual collaboration efforts to date, sharing a little bit at the recent vPolicy event in London, however it appears that they have been developing a virtual space as a collaboration tool for onboarding, events, and training.  The project, known both as web.alive and "Project Chainsaw" (I prefer the second name, much more evocative) is starting to trickle out of Nortel as of tonight.  The screenshots I saw in London were very high quality graphics with hundreds of concurrent participants, which bodes well for the burgeoning 'enterprise events' application (think 'employee all-hands meetings')

Before any of the gaming people say 'Nortel WHO?', remember the fact that these guys have an enormous enterprise voice and video footprint that they can incrementally upgrade to include this function.  This is going to be a game-changer in the enterprise collaboration market for Virtual Worlds.

Video on YouTube of the Project Lead talking about Chainsaw with some screenshots.

Take a look at the breaking news on their website for more details.  I am hoping to get some time with their CTO of this effort over the next two days for inclusion into the TIG Industry Outlook for the VW space, so stay tuned.

Comments

[Arn Hyndman]

Nortel has issued two press releases today that are likely to be interesting: http://www2.nortel.com/go/news_index.jsp

And you can get more information on Nortel's Virtual World / Next Generation Communications project at www.projectchainsaw.com.

[reuben steiger]

Very interesting. Did you end up talking to the CTO? If you had to list the top 5 players, in order of relative importance/ interest in the Enterprise VW space, who would they be?

[Christian]

Reuben,

Sorry, just saw this comment.

Top five players for Enterprise VW? In no particular order:

RRR+Linden
Nortel
Qwaq
Sun
Forterra or Proton Media

Some of those are in a future tense, some are present tense.

I think it's all still warm jello until we see some tangible enterprise collaboration deployments. Until then, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with on-boarding and other corporate training trials.

Would be interested in your thoughts on the subject as well, given our different vantage points on the industry.

C

[Christian]

Follow on to prior comment (I need to wear my glasses when reading!):

I wouldn't rank them quite yet, because it's still 'Apples, Oranges, Kumquats' stage, with each company targeting different aspects. Some are farther along with integration with enterprise infrastructure, some have better visual fidelity, etc. No one has all the components yet that I have seen.

Not counting the IBM announcement yet with OpenSim as I have seen many announcements from IBM in this space that never reached productization, however the idea of integration with the Lotus Notes/Sametime suite is quite appealing.

C