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.
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.
Posted by: Arn Hyndman | August 21, 2008 at 08:51 AM