ZyLAB is now known well known as a provider of eDiscovery and information risk management tools used by corporations and their advisers to plough through very large volumes of data to get quickly and cost effectively to the information which matters. If much of its technology is aimed at solving eDiscovery and investigations problems, it is increasingly involved also in anticipating them and in pre-emptive mitigation of potential problems and the expense which they cause.

There are not many companies in this area which can point to a 30-year history, but it is ZyLAB’s 30th birthday this year. I have known it almost from the beginning, since I was an early user of ZyIndex, the first full-text retrieval software for the personal computer. I used it when I was a litigation lawyer in its original MS-DOS version, cutting my Boolean teeth, as it were, with its command line syntax.

ZyLAB is understandably proud, not just of its longevity, but of the success which it enjoys with its wide-ranging portfolio of products and services. It has published a calendar of its developments from ZyIndex all the way through to its tools for eDiscovery, defensible disposition, intelligent data migration and Big Data risk management with visual classification tools which seem as far removed as possible from the long and complex queries which I used to write.

The next 30 years should be even more interesting.