July 28, 2009

The Real Value Of Virtual Worlds

A Guide For Hooking Business Customers And Partners With This New Technology

by TJ Keitt

with Ellen Daley, Reedwan Iqbal

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

From the point of view of most business leaders, the utility of virtual worlds in business is not apparent. Heretofore, virtual world vendors have not done a particularly good job articulating the value because many are wrongly trying to set up their solution as an alternative to flawed — but good enough — Enterprise 2.0, collaboration, and conferencing solutions. This strategy obscures what should be the central message of virtual world providers: They allow for groupings that can be augmented or reduced on the fly while also allowing users to consider information from multiple applications simultaneously. Once vendors refine their message to this, they will have a storyline that can appeal to a broader customer base as well as unified communication (UC) providers with whom they can partner. To this end, virtual world vendors need to limit their focus on the quality of avatars, stop trying to compete with other collaboration solutions, and start building relationships with other collaboration providers.

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