We realise that.
The name “ROAM” comes from an anagram of the 3 founders who established the business back in 2000 – Rose, O’Brien and McArdle. The “global” bit was an obvious reference to our aspirations, even back then.
Unfortunately it has proved to be a very unwise choice of name:
1) For those involved in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM), we are sometimes confused with our former sister company, ROAM Consulting – which is understandable;
2) Everywhere else we are confused with a telecoms company (including by the people in the Telstra helpdesk, who direct to us calls from poor stranded Australians all over the world!).
Both are very understandable points of confusion – which reflect a very unwise choice on our part in the early days of the company.
Hence at the end of 2006 we began the process of renaming the company. We’ve completed the following steps:
1) We ran a competition in which we asked clients, and a few others, to suggest a name:
(a) For as long as we maintain it, the details of the competition, along with some of the suggestions received, are here.
(b) As implied by Hamish Chadwick, our competition was useful for providing us a view of how clients saw us, but was not useful in actually giving us any suggestions that made the “final cut”.
2) With the assistance of a consultant (Image Substation) we spoke (in detail) with a select number of valued clients to gain a better understanding of what it is that people value us for. Clarity, Convenience and Cost Effectiveness were some stand-outs.
3) As a result of this, we brainstormed a range of different names.
4) From a long list we picked a number of candidates and proceeded to:
(a) Register the .com and .com.au domain names
(b) Register trademarks in Australia (trademarks in a select few foreign countries still to be done at the time of writing).
(c) Checked that the company name was available.
5) What’s holding us up, most, is that we want to roll out the new company name at the same time as a new software licensing system, which has been the real roadblock.
(a) This is one of the reasons we have recently begun to adopt the Agile software development methodology.
(b) Hence, we hope that we won’t be stuck with our existing name for too much longer!
PS – yes, I back-dated this post as well, to be sometime around the time we started the process of renaming the company (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages ago).
You will recognise, by now, that I see ICT as an enabler, not as an end in itself – hence I do apologise to any Blog Conservatives out there who I might have offended by this practice.
I don’t recommend it
An excellent book.