Branding and naming is a fraught exercise. This was first brought home to me when I discovered that Body Mist had unfortunate connotations in Germany but, leaving aside the perils of translations into foreign tongues, the issue of company and brand names is still a complex one.

What do we want from a company or product name? Preferably, a name should be something catchy, distinctive and easily memorable. But which is more important? For example, a few years ago Nat Systems changed the name of its product from NSDK2 to NatStar. Speaking purely personally, I preferred the former. Certainly it was not easily memorable but it was definitely distinctive, and once you got used to it, it tripped off the tongue readily enough. On the other hand, NatStar is pretty much a ho-hum sort of name.

Of course, some renaming exercises go better than others. Borland's decision to rename itself as Inprise was a disaster, so much so that it had to go back to being Borland. On the other hand, ODS made a pretty good job when it changed its name to eXcelon, mimicking its main product.

Another consideration is that, ideally, product names should be both short and descriptive. For example, if you want to write about the Oracle database, then technically you have to refer to it as the Oracle9i Database - 9i is much easier, and let's fact it, everybody knows that 9i is Oracle's database - why the need to rub it in?

In my view, having to put Oracle or Informatica or whoever, every time you mention a particular product, just makes reading the report or white paper that much more difficult. And it's worse if the vendor insists on having its name in capital letters all the time.

Name changes are also a problem because it's easy to forget. For example, I recently wrote an article about CA's CleverPath Portal but referred to it as Jasmine Portal, its original name. Personally, I think Jasmine is much more distinctive and while CleverPath may be intended to be descriptive, my reaction to it is closer to something that might make me consider throwing up.

Not that CA is alone in its troubles. Informatica has gone through a whole series of names for its Analytic Applications. However, in this case it is simply because it got the names wrong in the first place. For example, it used to market a product called Informatica eProcurement. That this was a misnomer is evidenced by the fact that the product is now called (after about the third iteration of name changes) Informatica Supply Chain Analytics, which is much more apt, is descriptive but lacks sparkle.

Most recently, and the reason why I raise this subject in the first place, Citrix has recently announced the results of its own re-branding exercise. Now, Citrix is a good name - easily remembered, distinctive and catchy - moreover, it has now re-branded its entire product range under the tile of the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite.

In effect, everything now has the MetaFrame tag. This is good, a well-known brand with all the sort of attributes that you might look for. However, I do have a few gripes, most notably the length of the product names. For example, rather than simply calling its flagship product Citrix MetaFrame (or even just MetaFrame) it is called the Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server, which I think is too long-winded.

The Citrix announcement has thrown up another naming issue. The company has renamed what used to be called NFuse Elite, sorry Citrix NFuse Elite, and it is now called Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager. Now, the product (which includes a number of enhancements in this release) does provide secure access to information so, to that extent, this is a reasonable description. However, the truth is that it is really an enterprise information portal, albeit one that is primarily intended for internal (intranet-based) use.

Of course, NFuse Elite doesn't tell you anything about what the product does but Secure Access Manager is, in a lot of ways, directly misleading. This is intentional. The problem for Citrix was that its distributors and resellers are primarily engaged at a level that involves talking about hardware and operating systems and so on, and not about end-user presentation and integration.

Moreover, the sort of people within customer organisations that they are talking to, are also concerned with infrastructure details at this level. Mention a portal to them and they'll send you down the hall to talk to somebody else. In other words, selling a portal solution was very difficult, neither Citrix nor its partners really had experience with this sort of sell.

On the other hand, both Citrix's partners and the people they negotiate with in customer organisations are used to dealing with security. So touting its portal as a Secure Access Manager makes a certain sort of sense. Indeed, Citrix obviously thinks that it makes a lot of sense.

So, what's in a name? Obviously quite a lot: not only does it need to be memorable and have all the other characteristics described above, it also needs to address its target market, and that may not be as clear cut as it appears at first glance.