I reviewed the RFP, and submitted the questions toward the end of the deadline that pointed out Second Life’s inability to meet some of the original technical performance requirements: single port through firewall capability, vendor required hosting, SSL. I also pointed out to my team that a large majority of these technical requirements were taken directly from OLIVE’s own website, almost forcing the hand of NATO to either remove SL as a viable solution, or adjust their requirements. This work led to the final Q&A answers that cleared up SL’s ability to offer a competitive solution. Yet, we see who still won the contract--Nexus

While ACT has a sim within SL, it was not suitable for this RFP for many reasons including originally not meeting the RFP’s technical requirements. SL in general fell short on many other aspects compared to OLIVE and Nexus solutions including native support of MS Office documents and competitive HTML support in-world (in addition to some of the other advantages of Nexus represented above in earlier comments).

Second Life, in the real world, still has many obstacles to overcome if it wants to be USED as a successful platform for immersive meetings/training. A majority of the real life companies using Second Life still make use of the word “experiment” when referring to their sims while other organizations leave this word out when they’ve chosen OLIVE or Nexus. Unfortunate, but true for Linden Labs if this is a strategic direction and competitive landscape they see in their future.