There’s really no great story for the Netcordia name. My prior company was Chesapeake Computer Consultants, Inc.* That’s a mouthful. We eventually used ‘Chesapeake’ as the name (changing from CCCI). I decided that any subsequent company would have a nice, short name that could be easily spelled.
When I started consulting after leaving Chesapeake, I used ‘Intaligent, LLC’. Note the mis-spelling. I learned in a couple of months what a mistake that was. No-one could spell it correctly. Time for a new name.
I keep a notepad in my car. When looking for a company or product name, I jot ideas on the notepad. It is a way to use driving time to occupy my mind. The inputs are names and fragments I see on buildings, signs, trucks, license tags, and bumper stickers. The fragment ‘net’ held high potential as part of the name because the company would initially do network consulting. The process took weeks and resulted in a short set of names that looked promising. Web searches invalidated many of the names because they were used for someone’s web site or product name.
Netcordia made it through that process, as did several other names. Sorry, no magic, no inspiration, no family member names, or trees**. Just a process and working through combinations of things and picking what looked to be the best of the results.
-Terry
* Chesapeake became one of Cisco’s premier training partners. We had the best Cisco training program of all the training partners. Cisco sent their staff to our classes. Customers raved about the quality of the instruction. We invented the vLab online training system. Chesapeake didn’t survive the downturn in the training market that occurred when the tech bubble burst and the curtailment of the training market subsequent to the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11/2001. Chesapeake Computer Consultants was picked because I decided, like Steve Jobs picking Apple Computer, that if we didn’t have a better name by the time we needed to incorporate, that we’d use it. I still have the domain, ccci.com.
** Our marketing folks were delighted to discover that cordia is a type of tree, so they changed to a leaf logo graphic. Sorry, but a tree never figured into the origin of Netcordia.
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Re-posted with Permission
NetCraftsmen would like to acknowledge Infoblox for their permission to re-post this article which originally appeared in the Applied Infrastructure blog under http://www.infoblox.com/en/communities/blogs.html
