ZL Technologies

ZL Technologies (also known as ZLTech) was founded in 1999 in Milpitas, California and is a privately held, employee-owned developer of unstructured data archiving software. Its principal product, ZL Unified Archive®, is used by enterprises to consolidate all unstructured data into a single repository for the purposes of information governance—i.e. compliance, legal discovery, records management, file analysis. ZL Technologies' global headquarters is in Milpitas, California, and has international offices in Dublin, Ireland; Tokyo, Japan; and Hyderabad, India.^[1]

Background

ZL Technologies was originally established as ZipLip in 1999, a secure mail carrier that provided tracking, security, and authentication services. Its first customers were telecommunications firms, large organizations that required a robust architecture in order to govern their hundreds of thousands of email inboxes. In 2000, ZipLip's secure email and data tracking capabilities expanded to provide secure file share and collaboration tools for enterprise users, and in 2001 the telecom market experienced a bubble, forcing ZipLip to shift its focus to large enterprise customers. Additionally in the early 2000s, the regulatory and legal landscape underwent major changes—such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—and in response ZipLip expanded its focus to the newly invigorated requirements for regulatory compliance, accommodating the ingestion, archiving, and long-term governance of business communications. In 2006 the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) were amended to include electronically stored content (ESI) as a type of discoverable content, and ZipLip expanded its product to include eDiscovery functionalities to accommodate the new regulation.

In 2007, the company changed its name from ZipLip to ZL Technologies. In 2008 ZL Technologies added records management functionality in response to a growing focus by companies on file management. The additions allowed ZL Technologies to build a business model that encompasses both archiving and data management needs of large enterprises such as those in the Fortune 500. By 2012, ZL Technologies incorporated feature updates in the eDiscovery module and added advanced SharePoint, Documentum, and file share analysis features.

In 2015, ZL technologies native analytics functionality into its Unified Archive® to provide customers with the ability to leverage all of their unstructured data in order to gain valuable business insights.

Products

ZL Technologies' core product—the ZL Unified Archive®—is an enterprise archive and an interface platform for extension modules, like Discovery Manager, Compliance Manager, Records Manager, and File Analysis and Management. ZL's storage management software implements single-instance storage to remove additional copies of data and offline access.

Discovery Manager

ZL Discovery Manager allows users to identify, preserve, search, cull, review, and create data in one platform, allowing electronic discovery in the application with the EDRM. Functionality is customizable to match the company's eDiscovery needs. The module has tools for proactive eDiscovery, allowing data governance daily rather than on a need-basis.

• Unified Archive Crawl On Demand for selective archiving
• Technology-Assisted Review (TAR)
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) support for image-based files
• Configurable, automatic reminders, legal hold notifications, and questionnaires to key custodians
• Organized production with options to redact documents and generate attorney-client privilege logs
• Works with existing point solutions

Compliance Manager

Compliance Manager gives tools to help companies fulfill regulatory requirements such as SEC 17a-4, HIPAA, FERC 717, FINRA, MiFID II and GDPR.

• Post-review and pre-review modules to flag potentially non-compliant messages
• Customizable lexicon engine to suit company-specific requirements for lexical rules
• Statistical and random sampling of large quantities of mail to reduce review time
• Built-in compliance reports
• Multi-platform support and compatibility to review instant messages, social media, and all SMTP-based email platforms

Records Manager

ZL Records Manager allows records managers to apply category-level and records-level retention policies across all records in the organization, intended to provide defensible disposition without fear of spoliation risks.

• DOD 5015.02 Certified and officially endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for use by U.S. federal agencies
• Advanced search techniques to instantaneously retrieve all managed data across the enterprise

File Analysis and Management

ZL File Analysis and Management (ZL FAM) is a tool for data architects, legal and IT teams to interpret and manage unstructured data, remediate, introduce retention policies and perform enterprise analytics.

• ZL FAM is able to ingest an array of file types, work in mixed environments, and accommodate deployments both on-premise and in the cloud
• Analyzes metadata and content for files across ECM sources, Sharepoint, file shares, and email servers
• Unified management of files for all stakeholder needs (i.e. legal, compliance, IT, records, line-of-business)

Partnerships

ZL Technologies currently has strategic and technological partnerships with many software and storage companies including ARMA International, DLT, Hearsay Social, IBM, Information Governance Initiative, KrolLDiscovery, Microsoft, NeoAxis, Onix, PwC, Ricoh, Socialware, Viewpointe.

Awards & Recognition

Analyst Standing

Gartner: ZL Technologies is seen as a “Leader” within the enterprise information archiving space, Gartner, Inc. 2014.^[2][3]

Forrester: Named Strong Performer in Message Archiving Software space, Forrester 2011.^[4] 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.^[5]

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.^[6] 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.^[7]

References

External links

• zlti.com
• analytics.zlti.com