What's your name again?

The name GRIC just had to go. "One of our enterprise partners said at a national sales conference in front of 500 people that the name reminded him of a Slavic warlord," says Rob Fuggetta, who earlier this year led an effort at the remote-access service company to change its name to GoRemote. "Our name might have been memorable, but it wasn't appealing."

Hosted call-center company White Pajama hasn't had it any easier.

"It was difficult to get through accounts payable with a name like that," acknowledges Aaron Burcell, director of marketing for the colorfully named company. One potential customer said," 'OK, we'll do this deal if you promise to change your name by the end of the year.' They were only half-kidding."

White Pajama plans to strip off its name by the end of this month.

Even given such good reasons, going through with a company name change is a huge decision considering the time and money put into establishing the original brand and that needs to be channeled into promoting the new one. Then there are the more mundane aspects of making the swap - redesigning business cards and signage, and making over Web sites.

Not that all this has stopped many a network company from coming up with a new handle.

MCI, for example, couldn't wait to ditch the name WorldCom last year as part of its post-scandal comeback effort ("We wanted a new name that would make us proud," Chairman Michael Capellas said at the time.) More recently, Network Associates readopted the name McAfee in an effort to focus squarely on the security market where McAfee's name is well known.

In GoRemote's case, the company is evolving from being a supplier of services mainly to ISPs to an enterprise network service provider. The company wanted to move to a clearer name, especially because the moniker GRIC was not all that familiar to its new target audience anyway, Fuggetta says. GRIC originally stood for Global Reach Internet Consortium, reflecting its initial focus.

GRIC, which officially changed its name in May, started the process back in 2002. The company, which actually was called AimNet back in the early 1990s, hired a branding firm and tested a set of names, but decided not to pull the trigger.

Fuggetta signed on as a consultant to the CEO in January 2003 and made the name change one of his recommendations as part of a broader marketing revamp at the company. GRIC hired Fuggetta as its senior vice president of worldwide marketing that summer, and the name-change project went into high gear in January.

At one point Fuggetta, who left the company earlier this year and now is back to serving as a consultant to GoRemote, got stuck on the notion of working the word "beyond" into the name. But that idea got dashed one day when his wife pointed out that she just received a sample of a new tampon in the mail that bore the name Beyond.