Late last year it was brought to our attention that Blackbox is an internationally trademarked name. Though we believed we had grounds for being able to continue using Blackbox Enterprise Solutions (BBES) as the name of our company, we took this as an opportunity to re-evaluate and align the naming of our company to the services that we have been and hope to continue to provide in the future.
I originally conceived the name Blackbox sometime around 2004, when I decided to go out on my own and form the new business Blackbox Software Inc. Blackbox Software (BBSW) was a software consulting company that allowed me to subcontract through various prime vendors to the Department of Veterans Affairs in support of work that I was performing on the VA Repositories Health Data Repository (HDR) project. I chose Blackbox as the name of my company because of it’s obvious software ties (e.g. blackbox software testing) as well as a metaphor for my relationship with my customers. Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings (thanks Wikipedia). I thought that, given what I understood about my clients, this is the way my customers hoped to deal with me. In other words, BBSW would create technical solutions that worked but that my customers didn’t really need or want to understand the internals of. Looking back on it now, I’m not convinced that a lack of understanding is the best idea for either party.
How we arrived at Blue Guardian IT Professional Services
When considering new names for our company, we considered the type of work we do or want to do (past, present, and future) and who we typically do that work for. Then we started identifying themes that we wanted present in the name. The latter – who we work for – is government, both state and federal. Also we’ve performed a considerable amount of work for Veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs within their Veterans Health Administration (VHA) organization – building big healthcare solutions for the VA’s healthcare network. These factors led to wanting something tied to government, military, protection, and security. These are all considerations in any work that we do. The term “Guardian” came to mind for several reasons. First because both the Government and our Military are there to guard our country from potential attacks. Alternatively, each of us, and especially our Nation’s Veterans, deserve protection and security for their information. In today’s information age there’s a lot of our information floating around. We all want this information to be secure and its use closely guarded.
Next, because Guardian is pretty typically included in firm names, we needed something else meaningful that would distinguish our firm from other firms. We were lucky here, as the principle partners last name is Blue and if you lookup what the color blue symbolizes to people, it includes depth, stability, trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, and intelligence. This is what I’d be expecting and hoping for if I were hiring a firm to perform work critical to my organization and my customers. Finally, we incorporated IT Professional Services into the naming of our company because this includes a broad category of work that defines not only what we’ve done in the past and or currently performing, but it is also relevant for work that we hope to branch out into in the future.
I believe that covers it. If you’ve not done it before, changing your business name after your business has been up and running for several years is sort of a pain. And yes, we will be applying for a trademark for both the name, Blue Guardian IT Professional Services and all logos for BGIT to prevent this from happing again the future. Cheers!