ZyLAB Technologies

ZyLAB
Company type	Private
Industry	Software, eDiscovery and Information Risk Management, Records Management, Email Archiving, SharePoint Archiving
Founded	1983
Headquarters	McLean, Virginia; Amsterdam
Key people	Pieter Varkevisser, president & CEO; Dr. Johannes C. Scholtes, chairman & chief strategy officer
Products	ZyLAB Information Management Platform and various bundles for eDiscovery, email & SharePoint archiving, text-analytics, visualization, contract management, and workflow.
Website	www.zylab.com

ZyLAB is a developer of software for e-discovery, information risk management, email management, records, contract, and document management, knowledge management, and workflow. The company is headquartered in McLean, Virginia and in Amsterdam, Netherlands. ZyLAB’s most important products are ZyLAB eDiscovery & Production System, the ZyLAB Information Management Platform and bundles that build systems for deployments.

History

In 1983 ZyLAB was the first company providing a full-text search program for electronic files stored in the file system of IBM-compatible PCs. The program was called ZyINDEX. The first version of ZyINDEX was written in Pascal and worked on MS-DOS. Subsequent programs were written in C, C++ and C# and work on a variety of Microsoft operating systems.

In 1991, ZyLAB integrated ZyINDEX with an optical character recognition (OCR) program, Calera Wordscan, which was a spin-off from Raymond Kurzweil’s first OCR implementation. This integration was called ZyIMAGE. ZyIMAGE was the first PC program to include a fuzzy string search algorithm to overcome scanning and OCR errors.

In 1998, the company developed support to full-text search email, including attachments.

In 2000, ZyLAB embraced the new XML standard and created a full content management and records management system based on the XML standard and build a full solution for e-discovery, historical archives, records management, document management, email archiving, contract management, and professional back-office solutions.

In 2003, the company invested in expanding the ZyIMAGE product suite with advanced text analytics, text mining, data visualization, computational linguistics, and automatic translation.

2005: ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform was released, an integrated solution to address information access problems.

Platforms for ZyIMAGE e-Discovery and legal production, historical archiving, compliance, back-office records management and COMINT were launched in 2007.

2010: ZyLAB Information Management Platform was released, an integrated solution to address e-Discovery and information management problems.

Customers

Initial customers of ZyINDEX were organizations such as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to investigate electronic data from seized PCs, the U.S. Navy for on-board manuals, and law firms around the world for e-Discovery. Over the years, ZyLAB received grants from the European Union (DG13).

Other well-known ZyLAB customers were O.J. Simpson's defense team, war crime tribunals such as the trial of Slobodan Milošević, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the UN-AKRT-ECCC Cambodia Khmer Rouge trials and the Rwanda tribunal. In 2007, the U.S. Executive Office of the President selected ZyLAB for email archiving, basically for its open XML structures, which is endorsed by organizations such as the National Archives and Records Administration. ZyLAB’s software was used for many other high-profile investigations such as the Oklahoma City bombing.

Public websites also use the ZyLAB Webserver.

Gartner positioned ZyLAB in the "Leaders" quadrant in its 2007, 2008 and 2009 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Solutions, gave it a strong positive rating in its 2007, 2008 and 2009 e-Discovery Marketscope and a Positive Rating in its 2007 and 2008 Records Management MarketScope.

ZyLAB’s chief strategy officer, Dr. Johannes C. Scholtes, is professor in text mining at the University of Maastricht faculty of Humanities and Sciences and director in the board of AIIM.

System overview and compatibility

According to the company’s website it delivers systems for deployments, product bundles and the core components is the ZyLAB Information Management platform include:

Systems:

ZyLAB eDiscovery and Production
ZyLAB Compliance and Litigation readiness
ZyLAB Law Enforcement and Investigations
ZyLAB Communications Intelligence
ZyLAB Digital Print and Media Archiving
ZyLAB Enterprise Information Management

Bundles:

E-Mail Archiving Bundle
Microsoft SharePoint Bundle
Analytics Bundle
eDiscovery EDRM Processing bundle
DoD and Sox Compliant RMA Bundle
TIFF Archiving and Production Bundle
WebPublishing Bundle
Commercial Publishing Bundle
Business Process Automation Bundle
Development and Integrators Bundle
Scanning Bundle
Digital Copier Bundle
Professional Text Mining
Machine translation

Supported configurations

Server OS: Windows 2003, Windows 2008
Databases: XML, MS SQL Server 2005, MS SQL Server 2008, Oracle 10g, Oracle 11g, mySQL
Web Servers: IIS
Client OS: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
Clustering: Support for Active/Passive Failover.
Authentication: Active Directory, LDAP, XML, NTFS, IBM Tripoli.
Virtualization: VMware Infrastructure, VMware Workstation, VMware Server, VMware Fusion.

Languages supported

Unicode. Support for documents in all languages.
Internationalization. ZyLAB offers translated products for English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Portuguese, Arabic and Persian. In addition to these languages, over 400 languages are supported by ZyLAB's recognition and full-text indexing technology, including all Western-European, Eastern European, Baltic, African, Asian and South American languages. ZyLAB's technical ability for broad language and character recognition enhances the accuracy of stored information searches and helps diminish the costs incurred by incorrect searches or text correction.

Zy-IMAGE-nation Annual Conference

The annual Zy-IMAGE-nation Conference is sponsored by ZyLAB. During this conference, seminars and interactive sessions from leading professionals about the advanced technologies and procedural enhancements that are driving new levels of operational efficiency in private and public sectors. The focus of the conference is on technologies that provide integrated capabilities for managing the accumulated knowledge of an organization, especially records and e-mail, as well as other business-critical processes. Related topics to be covered include best practices for e-discovery preparation and implementation, records management, email archiving, and knowledge management.

References

Definition of ZyINDEX in PCMAG.com's encyclopedia
Definition of ZyIMAGE in PCMAG.com's encyclopedia
Review of ZyImage 3.0 in InformationWeek
Mac version of ZyINDEX made its debut on Comdex
Review of ZyINDEX in the New York Times
Review of ZyINDEX on Computerwoche.de (article in German)
Review of ZyIMAGE's webserver on Computerwoche.de (article in German)
Review of ZyINDEX in the Miami Herald
ZyINDEX used in the Investigation of the Belated Production of Documents in the Oklahoma City Bombing Case
Review of ZyIMAGE on Federal Computer Week (FCW.com)
Zylab retrieval engine optimized for CD-ROM; Zylab, Progressive Technologies merge," Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing. vol. 8, No. 10, Jun. 6, 1994, p. 40.
Knibbe, "ZyImage 2 boosts, OCR, batch duties," InfoWorld, vol. 15, Issue 51, Dec. 20, 1993, p. 20.
Knibbe, "ZyImage 3.0 will facilitate distribution on CD-ROMs; Boasts integration with WordScan OCR software," InfoWorld, vol. 16, No. 38, Sep. 19, 1994, p. 22.
Marshall, "Text retrieval alternatives: 10 more ways to pinpoint important information," Infoworld, vol. 14, No. 12, Mar. 23, 1992, pp. 88–89.
Marshall, "ZyImage adds scanning access to ZyIndex," InfoWorld, vol. 16, No. 15, Apr. 11, 1994, pp. 73, 76, and 77.
Marshall, "ZyImage is ZyIndex plus a scan interface integrated," InfoWorld. vol. 15, Issue 10, Mar. 8, 1993, p. 100.
Marshall et al., "ZyIndex for Windows, Version 5.0," InfoWorld, v. 15, n. 21, May 1993, pp. 127, 129, 133 and 137.
Simon, "ZyImage: A Winning Combination of OCR And Text Indexing," PC Magazine. vol. 12, No. 6, Mar. 30, 1993, p. 56.
Rooney, "Text-retrieval veterans prepare Windows attack," PC Week, v. 9, n. 24, Jun. 1992, p. 46.
Rooney, "ZyLab partners with Calera: firms roll out document-image system," PC Week, vol. 10, No. 3, Jan. 25, 1993, p. 22.
Torgan, "ZyImage: Document Imaging and Retrieval System," PC Magazine. vol. 12, No. 3, Feb. 9, 1993, p. 62.

Gartner reports

Introduction to Investigative Case Management Products (18 April 2007)
Hype Cycle for Legal and Regulatory Information Governance, 2007 (16 July 2007)
MarketScope for Contract Management, 2007 (16 July 2007)
Choosing an E-Discovery Solution in 2007 and 2008 (18 July 2007)
Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2007 (5 September 2007)
Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2008
Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2009
The Expanding Enterprise E-Discovery Marketplace (12 November 2007)
MarketScope for E-Discovery and Litigation Support Vendors, 2007 (14 December 2007)
MarketScope for E-Discovery Product Vendors, 2008
MarketScope for E-Discovery Product Vendors, 2009
MarketScope for Records Management (20 May 2008)
Hype Cycle for Content Management, 2008 (8 July 2008)
Using the Electronic Discovery Reference Model to Identify, Collect and Preserve Digital Evidence (11 July 2008)
Using the Electronic Discovery Reference Model to Process, Review and Analyze Digital Evidence (11 July 2008)
Hype Cycle for Governance, Risk and Compliance Technologies, 2009 (17 July 2009)

External links