Today, VMTurbo takes on a new journey as the company transitions from the old name of VMTurbo, which has been around since its founding in 2008, to its new name and logo -- Turbonomic.  The new name comes from morphing three elements core to the company: Turbo Speed (real-time performance), Autonomic Control (self-managing operations) and Economic Principles (supply & demand equilibrium).

After speaking with the company, I must admit, I was a little surprised at hearing of the name change.  Why?  Because the company has done a fantastic job of branding, positioning and messaging over the course of the last eight years.  It doesn't matter if you are a customer or not -- if you operate within the VMware ecosystem, you more than likely already know the name VMTurbo.  And for most software organizations, that's half the battle... getting people to know (and remember) your name.

So why the name change?  Why the rebranding effort?  I had to know! 

Being well known in the VMware ecosystem is a plus and perhaps a minus.  And therein lies the rub, because VMTurbo is so much more than just a VMware ecosystem player.  Yes, they have supported VMware environments from the word go, but did you know their management solution does so much more than that?

Back in 2010, the company launched its 1.0 release of VMTurbo Operations Manager to help admins allocate resources within their virtualization environment as efficiently as possible.  In turn, they were able to help boost performance and proactively prevent issues, thereby providing a greater ROI to a virtual data center.

But the times, they are a changin'.  And if you don't keep up with the times, you're trying to sell the latest and greatest typewriters (what's that you ask?) to an audience of computer users.  And well, as we've seen, that doesn't work out so well.

So here we are with a rebranding effort -- a name change.  VMTurbo becomes Turbonomic.  And there are a couple of parts to this: VM, Turbo, and the green circle in the old logo.

The word "Turbo" (synonymous for turbo speed - real-time performance) hung on and remains in the name.  The green circle in the logo also remains -- The green circle is omnipresent in their user interface, it's the name of the company's community (The Green Circle), and it is much more.  So those two elements continue their level of importance in the new branding.  But the VM construct in the name VMTurbo is what evidently needed a face-lift if you will.  The company wanted to get away from the "limitations" or questions of "VM" -- questions like, "Are you relegated to VMs in order to operate the platform?" and "Are you only a VMware platform?"

In fact, Turbonomic operates with cloud products such as OpenStack, AWS, SoftLayer, CloudStack and Cloud Foundry; container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere; and of course virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Azure, IBM PowerVM, KVM, Red Hat, Xen and more.  So moving away from the VM starts to make a bit more sense. 

Or put another way, "Turbonomic controls ALL IT stacks."

"Our company was founded based on a vision to transform IT operations by enabling cloud and virtual environments to self-manage in real time to assure application performance," said Geeta Sachdev, CMO of Turbonomic.  "This vision was based on the belief that an autonomic platform is more scalable and effective at managing IT than legacy monitoring, break/fix approaches - and is the only way to assure application performance."

Sachdev went on to say, "Turbonomic remains true to our founding mission to help customers manage any workload, on any infrastructure, anywhere, anytime - supporting a multitude of cloud, application, containerization and virtualization platforms, from any vendor."

So in the end, perhaps the name change does make sense.  Only time will tell if the new name catches on as much as the old name.  One thing is certain, expect more good things to come from Turbonomic.  Next up?  The company will move away from the current flash, flex UI of the VMTurbo days to a more modern, future forward HTML5 client in order to support the "any platform, any device" mentality that fits within their "any" platform mantra when it comes to supporting the full hybrid stack.

Here's a screenshot of what's coming.  I saw a quick demo recently, and the UI and the entire package really is coming along nicely.  It should be a nice change moving away from flash and flex UI.

The company also plans to have a major presence at VMworld 2016.  And as part of their giving back to the community, make sure to go by their booth on Wednesday, August 31st to enjoy TechForward.io, a set of forward-looking and unbranded technology presentations on various topics such as Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and OpenStack in 20-25 minute technical walkthrus.