The 3D Internet; New “Knowledge Services”

We’re always on the lookout for the next new thing. In some cases, the impact of innovation is obvious at first glance. Other times we need someone to take us beyond the obvious.

Take Second Life, for example. In January, David Kirkpatrick, a senior editor at Fortune, wrote about IBM’s $10M investment to help construct the 3D Internet. He described how, at a presentation in Beijing, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano walked up to a PC and logged into Second Life, the best known of the 300 or so three-dimensional “metaverses” (a contraction of metaphysical universe—think virtual worlds).

While on stage, Mr. Palmisano, via his avatar, entered the virtual version of The Forbidden City and attended an internal meeting where employees were discussing supercomputing. He joined other avatars representing employees from Australia, India, Ireland, the United States, and other sites.

To be honest, my initial reaction was, “Why are corporations wasting time and money on virtual worlds?” At the same time, though, I printed Mr. Kirkpatrick’s article and kept it on my desk.

This week I ran into a friend from IBM at an SAP conference in Germany. He told me that if I continued thinking that Second Life was only about creating a new persona, I was missing the bigger picture significance of the 3D Internet. He then described some of IBM’s uses as well as some of the projects that it has worked on for clients.

Some of his ideas were intriguing. Imagine one day there is a 3D representation of your house—inside and out—in a virtual world. In the future, you might receive an e-mail from a vendor saying, “I visited your house in Second Life,” and an invitation to see how a new kitchen would look in your house will be included. Without leaving your PC, you can see cabinets, countertops, flooring, appliances, windows, and the like that fit within the dimensions of your home.

To some it sounds creepy, but others will think of how 3D will bring us closer to one-to-one marketing.

My IBM friend also talked about its value as a tool for marketing. For example, some car and clothing companies use Second Life to test new products ideas. IBMers also use Second Life for meetings, distance learning, and internal “innovation jams.” My friend wants to use it as a tool for visualizing core business processes. Imagine seeing a real-time 3D view of your supply chain.

3D customer service: seeing, not hearing, what to do

It would also be great for customer service. Recently, I spent nearly an hour on the phone with Dell customer service in an unsuccessful attempt to get my father in law’s PC to work. The poor service rep had me take the PC apart and remove memory boards and a video adapter in an attempt to get it to work. I would have preferred to go to a Dell website where I could see what he was trying to tell me to do. Of course, without a working PC, that visit would be moot.

When Mr. Kirkpatrick wrote his article, Second Life had received 2.6 million visits. When I visited this week, that number had grown to 4.4 million. No doubt, many people are joining for fantasy reasons—it’s the web, after all. Still, whether Second Life succeeds or not, the 3D Internet concept is an intriguing idea for selling, marketing, customer service, education, and running your business. In a future column, I’ll tell you more about IBM’s plans.

Closer to earth—“knowledge services”

Returning back to Planet Earth, I’ve been rereading my notes from last month’s trip to India. Here are some of the innovative new knowledge services being created and offered by services firms. They are being made available as consulting engagements or through knowledge process outsourcing services.

HCL

Most of the meeting with HCL president Vineet Nayar was spent discussing the company’s remote infrastructure management services. HCL lays claim to having a 76% share of this market.

What’s most interesting is what might come next. HCL sees opportunities to bring the same virtualization expertise to the applications market. We spent a fair amount of time talking about the concept of application appliances. Look for further coverage in an upcoming column.

Intelligroup

The SAP upgrade market is a huge opportunity for nearly every Indian firm. For its part, Intelligroup is creating an Upgrade Factory model to standardize, create reusable code, and make productivity improvements in SAP upgrade projects. It also will include prebuilt templates that incorporate best practices and frequently asked questions. Intelligroup told us that it can reduce the cost of upgrades by up to 40%.

ITC Infotech

You may have read about what ITC Infotech is doing for Indian farmers. The company has implemented SAP’s IS-Retail applications at Choupal Sagar, its parent company’s “shopping mall” for Indian farmers.

Farmers can sell their soybeans, wheat, and produce here, as well as buy fertilizer, pesticides, diesel oil, pumps, clothes, appliances, and life insurance. Other services available include training and banking. This is a huge improvement from how commerce was previously conducted.

Larsen & Toubro Infotech

Parent company Larsen & Toubro describes itself as a “technology-driven engineering and construction organization.” It’s also one the largest private companies in India.

Our meeting began with a discussion with Vijay Magapu, a member of parent company L&T’s board. Fitting his company’s engineering heritage, we spent most of the time talking about a range of new outsourced engineering services, including warranty analysis, engineering change, manufacturing problem resolution, and price management.

NIIT Technologies

Chairman Rajendra Pawar described several interesting projects in the insurance, transportation/airlines, and retail industries. What caught our attention most was the knowledge portal built for a well-known European retailer. Over the holiday season, more revenue came in through the portal or website than the stores. We intend to follow up and report on the details.

Satyam

Over coffee with Ram Mynampati, president of Satyam’s commercial and healthcare business, we talked about the company’s entry into several new markets, including pharmacogenomics (new services around clinical trial analytics and drug discovery), “pack management” or labeling for life sciences, animation, and new analytic services for the financial industry as a result of the acquisitions of Citisoft and Knowledge Dynamics in 2005.

Siemens Information Systems Ltd.

We spent most of the time discussing Siemens’s SAP expertise. Per my notes, the company has 1,300 SAP consultants and has completed 200 engagements. Siemens appears to be very strong in process industries, especially the Indian pharmaceutical companies, and automotive. In addition, the company has also developed two NetWeaver certified products.

SISL is also unique in that it has built a consulting group around Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints to serve the Indian market. To date, the company has completed 15 projects for clients in consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, steel, steel plant equipment manufacturing, and engineering software.

TCS

We started our conversation with N. Chandrasekaran by catching up on hardware virtualization. He described a project for one company in which TCS shrunk the server base from 640 boxes to 40 boxes. The conversation segued into three areas to watch for virtualization: multichannel management, mobile, and applications. More on this in a future column.

Next stop: Washington, DC

While many of us may be tempted to go to Washington to protest the early start of daylight savings time, I’m actually going to attend Servigistics’ user conference. As it turns out, Dell is a customer of Servigistics strategic service management software. I hope to test out my idea of 3D customer support on Dell and other customers. Look for my findings next week.

In the meantime, I welcome your comments and insights on metaverses, knowledge services, and the next big deal in the business intelligence/performance management space—brichardson@amrresearch.com.