ZyLAB Technologies

Since its very first day, ZyLAB has developed progressive technologies that have consistently put us in front of the competition in terms of product innovation. The following list offers a chronology of just a few of ZyLAB's significant technical achievements:

1983: First to offer full-text retrieval for PCs

1985: First to offer a PC-network search (Novell 1.0 and Banyan Vines)

1989: First to offer CD publishing for PCs

1991: First to offer fuzzy search, plus text, plus imaging for PCs

1993: First to offer a Webserver for PCs

1994: First to offer push technology (ZyALERT) for PCs

1998: First to offer hit highlighting and navigation on original images ("WYHIWYG")

2000: Largest number of languages supported in one PC imaging product

2003: First to provide a fully XML-based content management data repository

2004: Developed full suite of visualization and basic text mining tools

2005: First to provide truly modular XML-based Records Management (RMA), eDiscovery,           DMS and Workflow tools

2005: Fully integrated professional text mining tools into ZyIMAGE; capabilities based upon           advanced linguistic, pattern recognition, statistical, semantic, and other artificial           intelligence principles

2006: First to offer comprehensive XML-based Information Access platform for capturing,           archiving, managing, searching, annotating and sharing paper, e-mail, electronic and           multimedia files

This commitment to continual innovation-and the subsequent value-for-money that such innovation affords for our clients-remains a primary driver for ZyLAB to this day. The extent of our technology is what enable ZyLAB to offer the best variety of software and solutions to meet the information management and investigation needs of any type of organization, whether it's in the public or private sector. (See our Solutions and Products sections for more information.)

Regardless of how broad or how specific your needs are, you can count on any ZyLAB solution to provide you with the best available technologies for the following core information-management activities.

Capturing data
	Support for over 370 file formats
	Support for over 200 languages

These capabilities are enhanced through an extensive array of data capture and input modules, each custom designed for the most- requested customer needs.

For finding & sharing information
	Push alerting
	Fuzzy Searching
	Full-Text Retrieval
	Hit Highlighting and Hit Navigation

These functionalities form the backbone of ZyLAB's products for data output (i.e. finding and sharing), which can perform a variety of vital functions from searching, finding, and organizing information to sharing, printing and exporting all required data.

For supporting the latest compliance regulations
	E-mail archiving
	Structuring, organizing and annotating unstructured data

ZyLAB's signature product, ZyIMAGE 5.0-which is certified as compliant with established governmental standards -expands on these basic information retention and indexing components by offering several specific, detailed technology and productivity products for security, database integration, legal applications and third-party integration. Read more about ZyLAB's technology and productivity products.

For project collaboration
	CD Publishing
	Web Publishing

Regardless of the type of collaboration framework found in your organization, one constant is that information must be easily distributable among interested parties. ZyLAB clients can always count on their information being easily downloadable to the most common media as well as Web compatible. In addition, the ZyIMAGE product suite provides integrated tools to help users who require customized collaborative functionality in their workplace.

For technical integrations and long-term archival integrity
	XML repository
	Integrations with hardware, scanners and digital copiers
	Scaleable architecture

ZyLAB has made sure that its solutions are compatible and can be integrated with any system on the market. In addition, our robust XML repository means your data is always secure and retains its structural integrity as well as positioning you to avoid expensive upgrades down the road.

First to offer full-text retrieval for PCs
Even at its beginning, ZyLAB already had a significant number of customers in the legal, intelligence, military and law enforcement community. In fact, the US Navy was a major contributor to ZyLAB's development efforts in the 1980s. Throughout that decade, ZyLAB was concentrating on developing full-text retrieval technology for electronic data that was stored on PC hard disks. Native file indexing and automatic file-type recognition (such as Wang, Wordstar, Word Perfect, ASCII, and ANSI) were among ZyLAB's first technological innovations, as well as the development of a rich set of search techniques. The ZyLAB engine used the same command structure as Lexis-Nexis, which resulted in instant recognition by the legal community. By the beginning of the 1990s, ZyLAB provided solutions for several LAN platforms and had established market leadership for PC-based text retrieval (both MS-DOS and MS Windows). First to offer affordable imaging searching on a personal computer The prices of devices such as scanners and CD-ROMs decreased significantly in the early 90s, from about €20,000 to around €1,000 per device. As a result, more and more of ZyLAB's customers started implementing scanning activities. Searching and analyzing scanned data was a fundamentally different kind of process than searching data that was already electronically available, such as perfect ASCII, PDF or MS Word files.

As of 1991, ZyLAB had developed the first version of ZyIMAGE, a rudimentary imaging solution that allowed users to search the text output files of the OCR and scanning processes and to see the related image (the 'electronic photocopy') as well. The solution worked but had a number of flaws:

- The total processing speed remained below 2,000 pages per day per system
- No visual relationship existed between the OCR-text and the image
- Limited navigational capabilities
- No automatic language recognition for the OCR
- Users could see erroneous OCR output, which caused confusion
- No possibility existed to share images on a WAN

ZyLAB focused its research and development efforts on the development of the best total solution to capture, investigate, manage and share large paper, electronic and e-mail collections
Because ZyLAB had a rudimentary, though workable, solution for electronically searching paper-based archives, it recognized a niche that many other text retrieval providers ignored: making paper-based archives electronically searchable in an easy-to-use manner. This niche was increasingly recognizable in investigation-intensive organizations, such as law enforcement agencies, who are faced with vast amounts of paper-based files that are not available electronically.

Therefore, ZyLAB felt that if it could develop the best search engine for large paper collections, it could provide a full solution for paper and electronic data. This strategy would in turn provide ZyLAB with a major competitive advantage over many of the most-common solutions, which lacked the ability to input paper-based collections into their systems.

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