The name came to me one day in 2019 during a brainstorming session with two British Petroleum executives I was partnering with to define a framework to pen-test and certify the components that go into the systems installed at oil refineries. One of the guys looked like Christopher Walken’s character, Max Zorin from James Bond, A View to a Kill(1985), and I thought the name “Zorinsys” sounded cool, but I didn’t like the spelling, so I changed it to Xerensys. I registered the name, but we never used it. Then the pandemic hit, and the two BP guys were given golden parachutes with non-comp clauses, so the project died.
When talking to people, and as others have reported, I’m asked what Xerensys means. Since the actual story is long and feels irrelevant to what we are doing, I would reply with the question, “What does Xerox mean?”
“What does Xerox mean?”
Xerensys, like Xerox, is a neologism, a made-up word. But Xerox has become accepted as a word for making a copy. Now, I don’t have any lofty aspirations that Xerensys would mean anything other than a cool name for a tech company, but I thought I’d better come up with a better story than it was named after a psychopathic Bond villain bent on destroying Silicon Valley to monopolize the microchip market.
Lucky for me, there is a Galician word, xerar, that means “to generate, create, or produce.” And the third person plural (they) form of the verb is xeren. So when combined with -sys (system), Xerensys means a generative system whose primary purpose is to bring something new into existence.
If you want to tell the Bond villain story, go ahead, but the actual linguistic meaning is rather prophetic:
Xerensys - to innovate and to bring new solutions to life.
