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FROM THE SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE

One name, but the two are not the same I Corporate monikers can cause mix-ups Bruce V. Bigelow STAFF WRITER Jim Cable was wearing a shirt embroidered with his company's logo at his daughter's first-grade open house last year when another dad angrily confronted him. This was around the time San Diego's Peregrine Systems first disclosed "accounting irregularities" that triggered a sell¬off in the software company's stock. Now in bankruptcy reorganization, the publicly traded software developer has been at the center of a corporate accounting scandal for more than a year.

But Cable is the chief executive of Peregrine Semiconductor -- a privately held maker of wireless semiconductors with no ties to Peregrine Systems. The testy encounter, Cable said, "was along the lines of, 'I made an investment in you guys and now I lost everything because of you.' " Such cases of mistaken identity might be an unfortunate sign of the times for a handful of innocents suffering collateral damage from a wave of nationwide corporate scandals that seemed to begin with the fall of Enron.

Houston-based Pipeco Services, for example, got wrenched into Enron's troubles in March after the bankrupt energy conglomerate decided to create a temporary entity -- also called PipeCo -- to hold its interests in three smaller companies. In San Diego, Cable, the semiconductor CEO, said the confusion over his company's similarity to Peregrine Systems is more of a nuisance than anything else. "I don't think anyone here seriously believes that it's impacted our business in a serious way," Cable explained. "It's more of the bad vibes .... It's really just an issue in our hometown. "

Still, the mix-up has sometimes gone beyond mere inconvenience. There was the time American Airlines put Peregrine Semiconductor on a credit hold, for example. And, "Sometimes, when Jim goes out to speak, people ask why he's out on bail," said Phil Chapman, who recently was named Peregrine Semiconductor's chief financial officer. Across town, Peregrine Systems officials declined to discuss the mix-up.

Three former executives at the software company have pleaded guilty to federal charges of securities fraud and conspiracy, and the investigation is continuing. Although some companies might be tempted to change their names to avoid further guilt-by-association, marketing experts said such a remedy is drastic and not always necessary.

"I would suggest that they move cautiously and make sure that the waters they're changing are not stirring up too much mud," said Tom Dougherty of Stealing Share, a Greensboro, N.C., firm specializing in brand development. For one thing, Dougherty said, changing a corporate name can become hideously expensive.

One question to ask is how much the audiences overlap, said Dominique Hanssens, a marketing professor at The Anderson School at the University of California Los Angeles. "It's sort of bad luck, in a way, for the semiconductor company," Hanssens said. "But at the same time, it offers an opportunity for the company to make a statement, you know, to say, 'Look we have nothing to do with this other unfortunate company.' " As a private, venture-backed business, Peregrine Semiconductor is not publicly traded.

And as a semiconductor manufacturer, the company has an established base of industrial customers that's far afield from the sort of enterprise software customers that Peregrine Systems sells to. "In a business-to¬business category like this, I would wonder how much real damage there is, except maybe for a bump on their pride," Dougherty said. "Sometimes, you just have to let the chips fall where they may."

Both Peregrine Systems and Peregrine Semiconductor have operated in San Diego for more than a decade. Sometimes a customer of one company would fax an order to the other by mistake, Cable said. But in this turbulent economy, he said, "It's just one more thing you don't want to have to deal with."