Chinese virtual world HiPiHi has partnered with IBM for what Massively reports is an "essentially twofold" collaboration -- IBM will provide scalable architecture, with hardware, services and consultation, and the two companies will additionally collaborate on interoperability standards. From Massively:

Secondly, there's collaboration on virtual world interoperability standards, which started out as a broad set of agreements last year, and some collaborative coding on CHTTP-and-escrow conducted by Linden Lab and IBM. Information-tech industry standards of any size or complexity generally take over a decade to formalize, and quite some more years to gain useful levels of adoption - so that's a much longer game to play.