IBM is to team up with Linden Lab to develop an in-house version of Second Life for businesses.

The pair will begin work on a project to turn Second Life's grid platform into a product which will allow enterprises to build secure virtual worlds that can be deployed behind a firewall.

IBM hopes that the project will yield a secure version of Second Life that the company can run in-house.

Big Blue is demonstrating a sample of a Second Life grid running on one of its BladeCenter modules at the Virtual Worlds Conference in New York.

IBM and Linden Lab hope to develop 3D worlds for businesses that can be used in-house and connected to other virtual worlds and platforms. The development of 3D worlds has long been an area of interest for IBM.

"As virtual world technologies and platforms become more commonplace, we see a need for an enterprise-ready solution that offers the same content creation capabilities but adds new levels of security and scalability," said Colin Parris, vice president of digital convergence at IBM.