I subscribe to the Register.co.uk it is a UK based Tech News website. Why do I tell you this, well in a recent mailshot they highlighted an interesting article on Dixons. For those that are not in the know, Dixon’s in a UK based electronics retail group, they own the popular PC world and Curry’s brands too, by now you are most likely trying to figure out my reasoning for this post. Well it is simple within the article it mentions that Dixon’s AKA the rather catchy DSGi are changing their business name to Dixons Retail PLC, because they want to:
“harness the strength of the Dixons name and to reflect the resurgence of the company. The Dixons name resonates strongly with suppliers, the market, and colleagues in a way that DSG international has not been able to”.
So what has this got to do with virtualization I hear you say, simple, companies change their name all the time. They rebrand their products to make it “shiny and new” or to reflect a change in corporate direction. For example, think of PHD and their recent re-branding of esXpress to PHD Virtual Backup for VMware ESX to reflect that they will shortly have a XenServer based product called PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer (or for the more cynical of your amongst the readers, due to the fact Citrix is now a major investor and did not like the fact that the flagship product contained the name of their primary competitor in the Hypervisor market).
However I digress, the Crux is that Dixon have changed their name to reflect the “resonance of the Dixons name”, this is a valid approach and as they rightly stated it is a lot more recognizable than DSGi. Now lets snap into the virtualization market space and look at Vizioncore, this is a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest, up until now they have run the company under the well known Vizioncore brand, they are however about to change it to the rather catchy Quest Software Desktop Virtualization Group. Now I can understand why Quest want to make this change, up until now they have needed to manage two separate brands, this also meant that they had two separate stands at conferences, so from a cost center point of view this makes eminent sense, however from a Marketing point of view the position less clear, VizionCore have been a presence in the third party virtualization sector almost from the beginning of the journey. They have a large customer base and a recognizable brand. Time will see how this Name change damages the customer base.