ZyLAB Technologies

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

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.

See also

• e-Discovery
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Document Imaging
• E-mail Archiving
• Knowledge Management
• Document Management (System)
• Enterprise Content Management
• Records Management
• Contract Management
• Workflow
• Text Mining
• Text Analytics
• Automatic Machine Translation
• Data Visualization

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.

External links

• ZyLAB official website
• The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM)
• AIIM