LANDESK had been working on rebranding itself for nine months, and the bringing together of the company with HEAT Software into Ivanti provides an ideal opportunity to create a brand – and a strategy around it – to cross-market and cross-sell all the company’s solutions.

The acquisition of LANDESK by Clearlake Capital Group from Thoma Bravo has been completed. With the closing of the deal, the new company formed by uniting LANDESK with cloud service management provider HEAT Software, which Clearlake already owned, has also been rebranded. That company will be called Ivanti.

The name itself is a rendering of the Italian word ‘avanti,’ meaning forward. And moving forward is a key part of the message the company is looking to attain with the new brand,

“LANDESK had done a number of acquisitions over the years, so much so that we had developed something of a split personality,” said Steve Daly, the former CEO of LANDESK who now becomes the CEO of Ivanti. “We had so many ways to market to different sectors of the market that it made branding harder. We have brands with great brand equity, but some, like LANDESK itself, have become associated with parts of the company that aren’t as strategic any more. We knew it was time to do something.”

Ivanti, Daly said, both conveys the sense of going forward, and – they hope – will have an association with Italian luxury goods.

“Apart from the fact that you usually have to make up a name these days to get a URL, we wanted people to think of us as innovative, and a company that could move into the future. We think Ivanti embodies that, even though the word itself doesn’t actually mean anything.”

While the creation of the new company provides an ideal opportunity for a rebranding, Daly said that plans had already been in the works to rename LANDESK, with its associations with desktop systems management.

“We would have changed the name anyway,” he said. “We were marching to do this even before the acquisition took place, and had actually been working on this for about nine months. The renaming coincided with the bringing together of the two companies. So it was very serendipitous that we could announce it now, with the coming together providing an ideal opportunity for a rebrand. We were really lucky.”

Daly said Ivanti has to negotiate what he acknowledged can be a challenging thing to pull off – emphasize the new company brand to provide a unifying force in the marketplace, while keeping the strength of the sub-brands. This will be primarily through ‘Powered by…’ branding. The separate websites which exist today will eventually be shut down, once Search Engine Optimization has built up the Ivanti brand.

“It can be tricky to do this, but we have had a lot of advice from branding experts,” Daly said. “We believe the ‘Powered by’ the sub-brands is the best way to do this. With the websites, the existing sites are designed to create that SEO around the sub-brands and direct traffic to the new site. Going to a single brand means we don’t have to maintain twelve different websites. It will allow us to branch out and cross-market and cross-sell our products. The goal is to bring everyone to the same place, because the power in our solutions comes by bringing them together.”

Using the new brand to leverage this theme of bringing things together is the centrepiece of Ivanti’s strategy.

“Ivanti will be marketed around the strategy,” Daly said. “It’s the way we are trying to support the end user market, which is so broken up today. Our message will be all about bringing things together – to unite IT to allow us to bring together a single secure digital workplace, rather than the fragmentation that is there now. Adding the HEAT cloud service management platform for the cloud delivery model will also help here.”

Some operational changes will take place beyond the marketing.

“Engagement with our teams in the field will be different, as we will move to a model that has specialists around the products,” Daly stated. “Partners will have unfettered access to all of the solutions in the portfolio. There will be no internal barriers between the brands. That’s a key part of the strategy – breaking down the pride of ownership that existed around individual brands like Wavelink, Shavlik and LANDESK. This will make it easier to do business with us than in the past.”