IBM and Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life, today announced the two companies are exploring the development of enterprise solutions for security-rich, custom virtual world creation and collaboration on the Second Life Grid platform.

At the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference (takes place in New York this week), they will demonstrate hosting regions of the Second Life Grid behind IBM’s firewall that will combine the operational scale and security of IBM’s BladeCenter with Second Life’s dynamic content creation tools and vibrant user community.

IBM plans to pilot a solution internally which, at that time, will be designed to allow IBM employees to explore the Second Life mainland and seamlessly cross over into IBM’s custom-built world behind the firewall without having to log on and off.
Additionally, deployment of the Second Life Grid behind IBM’s firewall is intended to allow for an environment of security-rich content creation, data assets and internal communications such as chat, IM and voice, while also enabling connection to the wealth of user-generated content on the Second Life mainland.
More details on the IBM Virtual Worlds site.

We just reported earlier about the enterprise grade immersive workspaces that Rivers Run Red announced at the Virtual Worlds 2008. That solution seems to be more comprehensive.