My money is on Dell EMC giving shed loads of cash so they can keep the name/trademark.
Court favours Nexsan over EMC in Unity trademark squabble
EMC will probably have to change the name of its Unity array, now that a court has found in favour of Nexsan's use of the trademark. Both companies market storage arrays branded Unity. Nexsan reckoned it filed its Unity trademark first and sued EMC for misusing it. EMC renamed its mid-range VNX/VNXe arrays Unity when it …
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Wednesday 19th April 2017 16:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Trademarks
Trademarks are complicated business but it seems clear someone at EMC was asleep at the wheel when they developed the Unity brand. EMC has/had dedicated people to manage brand and trademark research and registration. I'm guessing they knew they screwed up which is why they tried suing in a MA court to save something from this. But really, relying on someone's personal blog that simply used the word "unity" as a trademark name is about as flimsy as it gets.
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Wednesday 19th April 2017 19:49 GMT chrismevans
Chad's blog talks about Unity as a project or codebase, rather than product name. We all know that products have internal project names that don't reflect the final branding. As a previous commenter said, EMC screwed up, plain and simple. If I were the Nexan board, I'd negotiate with Dell/EMC for a payoff and agree to release the next version of their product under a slightly different name. The cash will be helpful in sustaining their business.
One other thought; EMC has always used the idea of "independent blogs" to somehow imply that Chad & Co are writing independent opinions from outside the company. It's a tactic also used by VMware. In this instance the process has backfired. Dell/EMC should establish clear boundaries on what can be put onto a personal blog and what should come from corporate. Eliminate the ambuguity for customers (and now the lawyers).
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Thursday 20th April 2017 09:24 GMT DavidHolmesUK
Disclosure: Dell EMC Employee with a 'personal' blog...
The question of personal and corporate blogs is tricky, but I think we have the right balance. Personal blogs, where the company affiliation (aka bias) is declared, allow us to share content and thoughts that otherwise would require a punitive amount of review and editing to comply with corporate standards. As an individual I'm allowed to make mistakes, to misspeak and sometimes to disagree or offer different perspectives to the company's stated strategy. But if I'm representing the company, I have to be absolutely on-point, and ensure that anything I say has been reviewed and approved which is time consuming and sometimes dilutes the message.
The last big corporation I worked for, personal blogging and communications were forbidden. I'm happy I work somewhere that provides me with an avenue to easily articulate my thinking without any need for burdensome oversight.
Obviously the opinion expressed above is my own and does not necessarily represent the view of my employer :-)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
