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When AT&T spun off its $26 billion systems and technology business two years ago, executives chose the name Lucent Technologies over some 700 other possibilities, including the acronym AGB.

AGB? No, it doesn't stand for Another Global Behemoth.

AT&T decided that the definition of Lucent -glowing with light and marked by clarity - better conveyed 21st century telecommunications than did the monogram of 19th century inventor Alexander Graham Bell.

A big part of corporate success rides on such calls, according to the consultants who earn a living helping corporations name themselves and their products.

"The corporate name is really the cornerstone of a company's relationship with its customers,'' says David Placek, president and founder of Lexicon Branding, Inc., the Sausalito, Calif., firm that coined Pentium for Intel. A name sets an attitude and tone and is the first step toward a personality, he says.

Name your search engine company Yahoo! and some might question your sanity, but no one will accuse you of lacking personality. Folklore holds that Yahoo stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, but company founders David Filo and Jerry Yang insist they chose the sobriquet simply because they considered themselves to be yahoos.Success has proven them wrong.

On the other end of the personality spectrum, Bill Gates may have sealed his enduring reputation for stodginess early on when he fashioned Microsoft from "microprocessor" and "software.''

"The biggest pitfall is for someone to say, 'We're in fiber technologies, so let's call ourselves Fibertech,' " Placek says. He admires executives who have the guts to take a risk when they name their businesses. Placek points to online book purveyor Amazon.com as an example.

Even if a company isn't unique, that doesn't mean its name can't be. Take Ethernet router YAGO Systems - Yet Another Gigabit Operation - the Gigabit Ethernet router vendor Cabletron Systems, Inc. recently acquired. And few monikers rival the frivolity of the now defunct NBI, which stood for Nothing But Initials.

However, some corporate names are more puzzling than provocative, at least until their origin is made clear.

Take Inktomi Corp., of San Mateo, Calif., for example. Inktomi is derived from a spider depicted in Lakota Indian mythology that was able to vanquish much larger foes through intellect as opposed to brawn.

"Conquering larger enemies through cunning and wit has a lot of parallels to the way that we build software,'' claims Kevin Brown, a company spokesman. "We put clusters of small computers together and they solve very large problems as a group.''

Maybe, but there's some risk involved when you name a software company after a bug.

When Michael Cowpland and Terrence Matthews launched their Canadian PBX firm 25 years ago, they originally planned to market an environmentally sound lawn mower that mulched while it cut. They took a shine to the name Mike & Terry's Lawnmowers. That lawn mower never got off the ground, but the acronym Mitel - for MIke & TErry's Lawnmowers - stuck. Cowpland later founded software vendor Corel Corp., which comes from COwpland REsearch Labs.

Prague-based Software602 started out in 1989 as a computer club that was assigned the registration number 602 by its then-Soviet overseers. Once the club was allowed to commercialize, company executives decided to keep the name.

Some corporate monikers are not at all what they seem to be.

Shiva was named in 1985 for what was then the world's fastest laser, "not the goddess of destruction and rebirth,'' insists a company spokeswoman.

Despite its shiny logo, Sun Microsystems' name has nothing to do with the star. It stands for Stanford University Network, the company's prototypical workstation.

Although Sprint may sound like a consultant-generated name to connote fast telephone service for a fast-paced world, the word actually is an acronym for Switched PRIvate Networks Telecommunications.

First impressions aside, a start-up's attention-grabbing name can become an image burden if and when the corporation matures, experts warn. "Yahoo is doing incredibly well now, and the name is provocative and playful,'' Placek says, but the offbeat moniker could date the company to a particular period in technology.

It's unlikely, however, that Yahoo would ever be mistaken for another company. The same can't be said for Micom, Microcom and Microdyne or Xircom, Xylan, Xylogics and Xyplex. These copycats and others of the ilk have melded themselves into a meaningless mishmash, according to James Dettore, president and CEO of Brand Institute, Inc., in Miami.

"In the early '90s, there was this big wave of high-technology names with Xs on the end, Zs and Xs at the beginning and prefixes,'' Dettore says. Although the names were arresting at the time, there are now so many similarities that it's confusing, he says.

Does that mean these dime-a-dozens ought to change their names? Not necessarily, given what is involved in making such a switch.

Ralph Faison was advertising and brand management vice president at AT&T when Lucent spun off from AT&T. Even with AT&T's deep pockets and help from consulting firm Landor Associates, his team faced a daunting job.

"We had about 12 weeks to come up with a brand and personality for a $26 billion com-pany,'' Faison says of the deadline dictated by an impending initial public offering. "Several companies we initially talked to wouldn't even consider the project, because they thought a quality job could not be done in that short a period of time.''

The newly named company had to issue Lucent stationery and business cards to 120,000 employees, paint 11,000 trucks and replace signs on 1,100 buildings. Faison wouldn't divulge the cost of Landor's services or the Lucent makeover, but says, "It's not something we would want to do every year.''

The payoff on such an investment may not be immediately apparent either, given that any new corporate name comes by definition with a low profile. Though Lucent now has semi-household-name status, it took several years and million of dollars worth of branding efforts to achieve.