Firms should think twice before creating acorporate presence in virtual
environment Second Life, analyst Gartner has
said.
The analyst said technical issues will cause consumers and
consumer-facing businesses to seek alternatives to Second Life by
the end of 2009.
"Second Life is acceptable for pilots and prototypes," said
James Lundy, an analyst at Gartner. "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."
Gartner has identified three key challenges that organisations
face in using Second Life.
One of Second Life's issues is desktop support, said Gartner.
Second Life widely supports Nvidia graphics cards and now certain
ATI cards, but not all.
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
that organisations need to examine this as user experiences become
more graphics-intensive.
Another challenge is Second Life downtime. Although Second Life
now notifies users in advance of planned downtime via a Google
shared calendar, that calendar has been found to be out of date,
with limited warning of future planned outages or rolling restarts,
Gartner said.
Any organisation that wishes to use the site 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.
Gartner said enterprises expected 24x7 access, scalability and
reliable, bug-free operations within their virtual
environments.
The third challenge to firms is that other virtual platforms are
expected to emerge. Gartner expects that other, more scalable
virtual environments will appear 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.