What’s in a name?  And why change it?

We’ve changed our name to Veriato.  So what?  Companies change names all the time.  Or they change a logo, or their brand color.   Why?  What prompts an organization to expend the time, effort, and money it takes to change its face to the world?

For us it started with a realization that we are not the same company we were just a few short years ago.  When I joined SpectorSoft – now Veriato – the company was an established leader in providing Internet monitoring to families that had very real concerns about what their children were doing on the web.  We had a growing corporate business as well, providing solutions to organizations seeking to better understand what their people were doing with the resources provided to them.

The founders of the company had moved on to pursue other interests and two respected private equity firms had taken majority ownership of the organization. The CEO, whom I had worked with in the past, had recognized that the future of the company was found in the business of helping businesses.

We made some emotionally difficult, but necessary, decisions.  We phased out the consumer focused business, doing so in a way that sought to minimize the impacts to the customers who had helped build the company from a small start up to one of the largest technical employers in our area.  We launched new solutions that addressed the challenges our corporate customers were seeking help with – most notably dealing with the clear and present danger posed by insider attacks.  We opened new offices and added fantastic talent.  We changed.

When we took inventory of all that we had accomplished, the realization set in.  A great organization, with a great core solution set, was transformed into something new and exciting.  It was time to change the name to reflect that.

If you have never been involved in a corporate name change, I can tell you that it is not easy.  There were many times that we thought we had the new name, only to wake up the next morning with a nagging “not quite” feeling.  We argued.  We agreed.  And then disagreed.  We went back to the drawing board more than once.  At one point, we came close to using a play on the Latin phrase “Modus Operandi,” which we thought worked well as our solutions are used to gain insight in how people operate.

As you can see, we arrived at Veriato.  “Veri” came to us from another Latin term – Veritas – meaning truth.  Why Veriato?  Because our customers, whether they are conducting incident response or investigation, detecting for insider threats before they manifest into attack, or seeking to improve productivity and efficiency, are seeking the truth.  They need to know the truth about what is actually occurring, without bias or supposition.  And that is precisely what our solutions, what our people, what our company works to provide.

I’m incredibly proud of the team we’ve built, the solutions we offer, and the many great successes our customers have shared with us.  I’m excited to introduce Veriato to the world.  I can’t wait for you to see some of the new things we are working on.  As the old saying goes, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Welcome to Veriato.