Merging network equipment giants Alcatel and Lucent plan to use the new name of Alcatel Lucent upon completion of their $25bn combination.

The aggregation follows the fashion of similarly conservative announcements from companies keen to protect existing brand equity. Sony and Ericsson kept watchers waiting for months before announcing that their mobile telephony joint-venture would be called Sony Ericsson, for example.

Others opt for entirely new brands. An SAP-Intel e-commerce venture in the late-1990s was dubbed Pandesic, for example, but the name did not bring the firm luck as the venture ended in failure