ZL Technologies

ZL Technologies, founded in 1999 as Ziplip and headquartered in Silicon Valley, is a privately held developer of software for e-mail, file, and unstructured data archiving. The company’s principal product, Unified Archive, is used by very large enterprises to consolidate all unstructured data into a single repository for the purposes of compliance, legal discovery, records management, and storage optimization.^[1]

Background

ZL Technologies was originally a secure mail carrier. Their first customers were telecommunications firms, which each had hundreds of thousands of mailboxes, requiring a robust architecture. With the explosion of electronic communication during the 2000’s the company quickly evolved into a scalable e-mail archiving solution for large organizations. They later included a compliance module, enabling financial customers to meet retention and numerous regulatory requirements.^[2]

Products

ZL’s philosophy in archiving revolves around a unified data repository. Although they offer separate modules for Records, e-Discovery, and Compliance there is only one data schema and the architecture in which they exist is the same. According to ZL this results in only one copy of the document being stored (no duplicates), a single retention policy, and consistent search results.^[3]

Modules:

• E-Discovery
• Compliance
• Records Management
• Storage Optimization
• Corporate eMemory

Customers & Partnerships

ZL Technologies currently has strategic and technological partnerships with many software and storage companies including Oracle, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, NetApp, HP, Hitachi, Akonix, Iron Mountain, and Sun Microsystems.^[4]

Analyst Standing

Gartner: ZL Technologies is seen as a “Leader” within the enterprise information archiving space, Gartner, Inc. 2013.^[5][6]

Forrester: Named Strong Performer in Message Archiving Software space, Forrester 2011.^[7] In a recent interview Brian Hill, a Lead Analyst at Forrester Research, discussed how ZL’s holistic approach to archiving has made it a very good fit for large enterprises.^[8]

Controversy

On May 29, 2009 ZL Technologies filed a lawsuit against IT analyst firm Gartner, Inc. alleging defamation, trade libel, false advertising, unfair competition, and negligent interference with prospective economic advantage.^[9] On August 19, 2009 Gartner Group filed a motion to dismiss the case. In a November 5 judgment, the court dismissed all claims except defamation and trade libel, and gave ZL 30 days to file an amended complaint.^[10]

References

External links

• ZLTI.com