Should your brand be your company name?

Yes, I did receive that advice back when I first took over VistaDB.  Many of my business friends told me not to do it, but at my previous company we used the core part of the company name in each of our products.  I always felt that tied them all together, and reinforced that our company was unified around this core. 

This worked great in that case because everything we did was central to a core technology.  All of the product brands were really just special uses of the technology, and we really did want to showcase that central technology to as many people as possible.  The products themselves didn’t matter so much, except to show that the core technology could be applied across a lot of different applications. 

But VistaDB is a product, and a brand, but that is not all we do (or can do).

In some cases the company name is the brand.  Mercedes sells their brand rather than the individual models of cars they make.  Most people don’t pay any attention to the letter/number pair on the car itself, they just know it is a Mercedes.  I think that works in some cases, especially physical goods.  I don’t think it works as well for software.

What is in a Company Name?

Take a look at this website post on your company naming strategy.  There are a couple really key points here that helped us with our renaming of the company.

Vision

VistaDB is not a destination or vision.  It is a product.  If we define ourselves around the name of the product, then what does that mean for us as a company?  We can only every product items around that one product?  What about 10 years from now when we have a major new database engine that is not based upon VistaDB at all?

Infinite Codex is a vision.  I have never felt that software is the limiter in what I can do or achieve. Infinite – We can do as many things as we like.  Codex, from the latin word for a block of word or building block.  Codex is also an ancient term for a collection of knowledge.  For us to have unlimited building blocks, or unlimited parts of knowledge is very, very fitting to me.  That is my vision, we can do anything.

Sensitivity

Unless you have been on sabbatical the last 5-7 years, you will no doubt have heard about Windows Vista.  It was a stupendous failure as an Operation System for Microsoft.  Windows 7 has shed the name Vista, and Microsoft appears to be trying to give users the largest incentives possible to move off it quickly.  What does that have to do with us?

Even though the product was named VistaDB well before Windows Vista was ever announced, people still associate the two.  We get emails from potential customers every week asking if we will work with Windows 7 since the name implies it only works with Vista.

Thinking in a larger context, what if we released another tool or product based around the VistaDB Software name?  Would people think the same thing?  That it was only for Windows Vista?  I did some informal polls at local user groups of techies, and at small business owner networking events.  In each case over 80% of the people I surveyed thought if a product had the name Vista in it, then it must only work on Windows Vista.  Not something we want to carry forward with us to other products.  For the database, it is something we have to deal with; changing the name on VistaDB would just be too confusing to customers. 

Compatibility

Since the name is expected to relate to your core business, I really felt that our core business is writing code, and building technologies around that code that others can use as building blocks to bigger projects of their own.  I would like to see all of our products have API and SDK components to them, may not always happen, but it is what I would like.

Product names?

We will not be changing the VistaDB product name.  To do so would be really confusing to users, and the marketplace in general I think.  We do have plans to release a number of database tools and components under the name CornerstoneDB.  That is what we have internally been calling the next major database engine, so it will have to change it’s name before going out to the public.  But the name CornerstoneDB for tools centered around databases (not just VistaDB) feels right to us.  All of these tools are central to building data driven products, they could become the cornerstone for multiple database tools that work with multiple vendors.

We will be using the Infinite in the naming of a few of the new products as well.  InfiniSiteSearch is an asp.net website search system we will be announcing very soon.