• BusinessWeek, Monday, May 5, 2008 11:02 AM

IBM and other large multinational companies are building virtual worlds to connect their hundreds of thousands of employees scattered across the globe. As Nicole Yankelovich, principal investigator at Sun Labs, said: "It's difficult to maintain a global corporate culture with people so spread around. Virtual world technology is a way to bring the company together to build a global corporate culture where people are on equal footing." The idea is that greater connectivity leads to enhanced productivity. Workers at IBM, for example, use virtual worlds for everything from meetings to collaboration, training and employee recruiting.

For those who don't know, virtual worlds let users from anywhere in the world use avatars, or graphical representations of themselves, login to an interactive, game-like environment where their avatars can perform many tasks. At companies like Sun Microsystems, where upwards of 50% of its workforce could be working remotely on any given day, virtual worlds offer the perfect opportunity to stay connected to the office without being there.

Some firms, like Xerox and Cisco, for example, still use the popular online virtual world Second Life to hatch their corporate strategies. But increasingly, the likes of IBM, Sun and others are focusing on building their own worlds, mainly for reasons of privacy and control. "Second Life is a public environment-outside the firewall, outside anything we control-and we can't depend on it being there when we want it," said one IBM exec.

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