Endpoint security firm Verdasys has renamed and re-launched itself as Digital Guardian in honour of its flagship software product, the company has announced.
When established firms give themselves a new name - Verdasys dates back to 2002 - the obvious question is why the management thought this necessary. What was wrong with the old name?
The official press release sidesteps this question but with a number of management changes in the last year, it could simply be that the new heads decided its product was more famous than it was.
"Digital Guardian has always had more recognition than the Verdasys name," offered a company spokesperson, backing up this theory.
"It is also more indicative of what the company is doing: branching out of a narrower use case of IP protection into broader data protection from both insider and outsider threats."
What is clear is that the renaming is part of a complete overhaul and re-launch rather than a mere masthead tweak.
Apart from being easy to mis-spell and mis-pronounce, Verdasys also sounded like a relic from the early 2000s when company names went through a fashion for meaningless nouns that sounded like they'd been invented by a brand creation company.
Name changes are not a bad idea in some cases. Famous examples include Andersen Consulting which turned into Accenture, WorldCom which turned into MCI (both after scandals), and Network Associates that wisely went back to its old but much more famous name, McAfee.
In March, Verdasys (as it was) announced a $12 million financing round, at the same time announcing a new CEO, Kenneth Levine, nabbed from McAfee.
The bigger question perhaps not so much why it has changed its name in 2014 but why an apparently established firm waited so long to re-focus itself in the first place.