Typically, when a company goes through a big acquisition, you end up with either a hybrid hyphenated name or a new name all together - or the acquired company just gets enveloped in the new parent's name:

De-Branding

• Genesys + VoiceGenie = Genesys
• Verizon + MCI = Verizon
• Intervoice + Edify = Intervoice

Hyphenated names:

• Alcatel + Lucent = Alcatel-Lucent
• St. Paul Insurance + Travelers = St. Paul Travelers Group

New Names:

• Guinness + GrandMet = Diageo
• Brooktrout + Excel = Cantata

However, there seems to be a growing trend in the voice sector where the acquiring company is taking the name of the firm it acquired.

For example, Eicon took over the Dialogic product line from Intel and rebranded itself Dialogic. SBC, originally split from AT&T at divestiture, took the name of it's former parent company and after ScanSoft acquired its archrival Nuance, it took the Nuance branding (while changing the colors).

In each of the cases, the choice to take the acquired firm's name was different. For Eicon, which lacked a strong brand following in the US, taking the name of its former competitor created immediate name recognition - even though what Dialogic was known for was a combination of market leadership, expensive cards, proprietary APIs, difficult configuration and long lead times, the antithesis of what Eicon was known for in Europe. SBC taking the AT&T name was clear - worldwide, AT&T is a brand leadership name, and even though it had gone through bad times, AT&T is one of those core American brands like Coca-Cola and Ford. In both of these cases, the brand name that was acquired was just as important of an asset as the actual technology.

ScanSoft's decision to take Nuance's name is a little more questionable. ScanSoft was historically a company that created optical character recognition software for the PC: scan in a document and it would extract the text and put it in a word document. At the turn of the millenium, it went on a purchasing spree, grabbing assets from Philips, Lernout and Hauspie and eventually SpeechWorks to become a company focused not only on text recognition, but also speech recognition. At first, ScanSoft tried to bury the SpeechWorks name - attempting to rebrand everything under a common scansoft name. However, due to the fact that everyone still called the speech technologies acquired by ScanSoft "SpeechWorks", Scansoft changed the division to "SpeechWorks Solutions from ScanSoft".

After acquiring Nuance - which is now called "Blue Nuance" because of the original logo color, ScanSoft decided to take the new acquisition's name and rebranding itself "Nuance" - also known as "Green Nuance" because of the color of the new Nuance logo. The theory behind this is that the name Nuance was more generic than ScanSoft, which still carried the connotation of being more of a scanner-centric/OCR name. The result has been general confusion.

The speech recognition industry is a very polarized group - with loyalty taking on an almost religious fervor. From 1999-2002, the choice of speech vendor was absolute - if you were a SpeechWorks/ScanSoft shop, then Nuance was strictly verboten. Now, hundreds of ScanSoft loyalists were being approached by "the enemy". Though Green Nuance did a fantastic job bringing the two camps together at its Conversations user group conference, watching the two sides sitting together was like watching detente at the end of the cold war - people feeling the "other side" out, trying to find common ground. Though the animosity is now gone, the product confusion still stands - "I use Nuance speech recognition" - "Green Nuance, Blue Nuance or OSR (The SpeechWorks/ScanSoft technology". Because Blue Nuance's product names in this space were tied to the company name (Nuance 8, Nuance Voice Portal), taking the Nuance name wasn't the best choice. Instead, taking a new name would have been the logical choice - if for no other reason than establishing a common ground for their users and to ease the product confusion issues.