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ZipLip Waits in the Wings
September 1, 2005
Some of the top names in information technology--EMC, Oracle, Symantec and Iron Mountain, to mention a few--have flocked into the burgeoning, regulation-fueled market for e-mail archiving. ZipLip isn't quite in that league, but market and technology trends are going its way.
After its founding in 1999, Santa Clara, Calif.-based ZipLip made some fateful decisions that kept it under the radar of the biggest vendors and customers in the field for a few years. "We adopted Java at a time when most people were betting against Java," recalls ZipLip co-founder, president and CEO Kon Leong, referring to the open programming platform developed at Sun Microsystems. That forced the company to build a unique architecture apart from that of the C and C++ languages prevalent at the time, but one that presciently embraced the highly flexible grid or utility computing approach that has recently gained credence throughout the computing world.
"It takes years to stabilize software and scale it up to the levels that this business requires," asserts Leong, a Wharton School MBA and a former mergers-and-acquisitions banker at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. ZipLip even built its own search-engine capability to meet the specialized requirements of large-scale archiving and retrieval.
"The incumbents in this business made their technology calls 10, 12, 14 years ago, pre-Java, and they got stuck," says Leong. "They have a big installed base, but you can't rejigger a pickup truck to do the work of a semi. They've had to go back and redesign, which is not a problem for us."
Now that archiving systems are being stretched to their limits by databases measured in terabytes (trillions of characters) or more, Leong expects ZipLip's Java 2 Enterprise Edition, grid-based system to prove a competitive advantage. "It's not because we're so smart," says Leong. "It's because my CTO [neural networks expert Arvind Srinivasan, who has worked for Liberate Technologies and NASA] is stubborn."
Market analysts applaud the company's innovative edge. In January, when ZipLip announced version 5 of its Unified Email Archival Suite, capable of archiving both IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange messages simultaneously--and therefore the DB2, WebSphere, Linux and Lotus operating platforms--senior analyst Masha Khmartseva of Palo Alto, Calif.'s Radicati Group said: "This is an outstanding achievement. There is no other archiving vendor in the space today that can boast these capabilities."
The risk of ZipLip's bold tech calls has paid off in tangible ways. To get early traction and put its technology to work, ZipLip positioned itself as a supplier of economical and comprehensive e-mail archiving and compliance systems--covering requirements ranging from the Basel II bank capital accords and European Union data privacy directive to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, USA Patriot Act and the Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 17a-4--for companies with limited IT resources.
Hence, the company's publicized customer roster consists of firms below the top tier, such as Memphis, Tenn. regional brokerage Morgan Keegan, a subsidiary of the Regions Financial Corp. bank holding company; New York investment bank Ladenburg Thalmann; Mississippi's Hancock Bank; and Dallas-based First Southwest Co. But ZipLip also now lists sizable customers in or serving the financial industry such as Automatic Data Processing, Bank of New York, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi and First Data Corp.; non-financial enterprises including Delta Dental, Furukawa Electric, SI International and Walgreens; and marketing and distribution partners such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle as well as messaging technology players FaceTime, IMlogic and Parlano.
