If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any product manager or marketer, it’s changing the name of an established product.

Just mention, “name change,” in a marketing meeting and watch all the nervous shudders, facial contortions and grimaces. Seriously, everyone dislikes it, and for good reason. If you have an industry-leading product, such as CA Nimsoft Monitor, delivering business value to customers, why would you ever consider changing it?

Well, we recently did just that by renaming it to CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM).

Why we didn’t do it

Call me unorthodox but let me start by explaining why we didn’t do it.

Many products have different names now than when they launched. Think Google started off as Google? Nope. It was called BackRub. Imagine saying, “I’m going to BackRub that…”

Yahoo was initially called, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” which to me sounds more like an old, well-thumbed hardcover travel guide than an Internet search engine.

In other cases, businesses change product names (and the actual product) because they’re being squeezed out in a highly competitive and crowded market. For example, Taco Bell started as Bell’s Burgers. That was until the astute owner correctly figured out that competing against some pretty big names in the burger flipping game wasn’t exactly a lucrative place to be.

Neither of these drivers were why we changed the name.

What’s in a name?

For years has been a great name: synonymous with innovation in infrastructure management. This has included first-to-market support for converged infrastructure like Vblock back in 2010, together with developing well over 140 out-of-the-box management probes designed to support the complex infrastructure underpinning service delivery for both our enterprise and service provider customers.

We also recognized it is a powerful, easy-to-use platform that IT organizations and service providers around the world use to manage and optimize their most critical systems and services and that should be available to all. That’s why last year we released – the same solution that helps businesses harness these capabilities for up to 30 devices at no cost. To date, it’s been downloaded by over 10,000 users.

So if we didn’t have a lousy name or the wrong product in the wrong place at the wrong time like the Bell’s Burgers example above, why did we change CA Nimsoft Monitor to CA Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM)?

Sending a unified message

It’s simple really. The new name represents the continued evolution of a great solution in context of the needs of our customers, especially with regards to unification.

Our customers can no longer gain the visibility and control needed to manage complex heterogeneous infrastructure and hybrid cloud services from maintaining multiple point tools. Now applications, services and business processes traverse traditional on-premise data centers, SaaS applications and public cloud services. Technical nirvana is no longer 360-degree visibility, it’s a business imperative.

As the pace of development intensifies with new mobile apps delivered to customers from the cloud, management must become further unified: combining disparate infrastructure monitoring into a single platform and enriching the solution with analytics, alerting and extensive cloud monitoring capabilities.

The CA Unified Infrastructure Management name represents our objective of delivering customers a single management solution for complete visibility into systems and infrastructure performance. We’ve also delivered many new capabilities that demonstrate our commitment to management unification. These include:

• Enhanced analytics and alarms, such as time-to-threshold or early warning of problems
• Extended support for AWS services, including custom metric support.

These are all delivered from a single unified architecture, which enables cross-functional teams to quickly and proactively monitor performance and availability, driving fast feedback and lower costs.

So go ahead and Google, “CA Unified Infrastructure Management.” I promise you’ll get more than a “BackRub.”

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