InovaWave is a US virtualization startup founded by former Surgient employees and launched in November 2006 with a product to optimize VMware and Microsoft platform performances: DXTreme.
In just 1,5 years the company changed its CEO and renamed its flagship product (from DXTreme for ESX to VirtualOctane).
Now it announces a complete indentity takeover:
Hyper9, Inc., formerly known as InovaWave, Inc., today announced the completion of a revised corporate identity, which will better align and communicate the company’s products and business to its target market. At the same time, Hyper9 also announced the appointment of Ben Rouse, an industry veteran with more than 20 years experience in enterprise systems management, enterprise information integration and high performance computing, to the new role of chief product officer. Rouse will also serve on the Hyper9 board of directors.
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Before coming to Hyper9, Rouse served as the CEO of United Devices, a developer of policy-driven automation solutions for next generation data centers, where he was responsible for the company’s continued growth and overall strategic vision. Prior to United Devices, Rouse was the president and CEO of Journee Software Corporation (acquired by Initiate Systems), a pioneer in the Enterprise Information Integration market. Before Journee, Rouse was the general manager of a $200 million business unit at Tivoli Systems, which was acquired by IBM. In five years at Tivoli, Rouse managed five different divisions through explosive growth and helped the company drive revenue from $50 million to $2 billion. Rouse began his career at LTV Corporation and has held various customer engineering and sales positions at Dallas-based start-up Pinpoint Communications and Convex Computer Corporation, a company acquired by Hewlett-Packard…
A company identity change is always a painful experience which ruins years of marketing efforts in building a solid brand awareness.
In some cases it may make sense: the brand awareness of Parallels was definitively superior than its parent company SWsoft and it’s easy to imagine how the name change is part of a strategy to maximize the exposure obtained on Apple market against VMware.
But when a startup which still has to impose itself as a popular brand decides to change its name, this basically means an attempt to start from scratch because of a major failure in the existing business proposition.
It’s also concerning that the new CEO took 7 months to decide for the identity switch, possibly meaning that the operation wasn’t planned since the first day.
It’s worth to see how the market will react to this move and if the new Hyper9 will be able to collect any trust from the already cautious prospects.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.