ZANTAZ is a Hacienda Success Story

By Jay Hipps, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

Company Has Grown to Lead its Industry in the Few Years Since its Founding

It's been just over five years since the founders of ZANTAZ, starting a round of golf at Discovery Bay, had an idea for a new business. The company was founded a few months later, received their first venture funding in June of 1998, and now leads a field that they in many ways created: archiving and retrieving e-mail to meet customers' regulatory compliance requirements.

Anticipation of a New Need

The company, which has always been located in Hacienda, was formed in anticipation of a new need. Recognizing the potential growth of the use of e-mail in the business world, ZANTAZ was founded to meet the needs of businesses which would have to archive and access that correspondence. They targeted the financial services market, knowing the strict requirements that applied to paper-based transactions like stock trades were likely to be applied to electronic communication as well.

"We started our business in financial services and were successful right away because we were able to identify a need that we were able to meet," says Gabriela Garner, director of marketing. "Now, we have top financial firms as our customers."

In addition to a number of top 10 Wall Street firms, ZANTAZ is working with companies such as Datek, E*TRADE, Robertson Stephens, and ShareBuilder.

One of the keys to their success has been the ease of implementing ZANTAZ's services.

"Our archiving service is an outsourced service where we're capturing, in real time, electronic communications such as e-mail," she continues. "We store that using our Digital Safe product and simultaneously it becomes available to the end user via a web browser so that they can immediately access that data and search it in multiple ways."

A Golden Retriever

The ability to retrieve this stored data promptly is the result of a patent-pending technology that the company calls Bias Dimensional Indexing (BDI). This technology allows users to locate specific documents instantaneously, even when they are just one of a trillion records.

"The amount of data that needs to be searched can be enormous and, in an audit process, customers might be looking for a particular file with specific parameters," she notes. "We've been able to support that kind of activity and the value that our customers place on that kind of support is tremendous."

Beyond E-mail...

Having established relationships with some of the top firms on Wall Street has also allowed ZANTAZ to begin providing other services to these firms.

ZANTAZ has recently finalized two alliances which will allow them to provide Digital Safe services to financial services firms seeking to communicate both internally and with their clients using Instant Messaging (IM). By agreeing to integrate FaceTime Communications' IM Auditor product and IMlogic's IMlog 2000 into their existing services, ZANTAZ will provide customers with a comprehensive solution for logging and archiving IMs whether their customers are using public IM networks like AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN, or private networks which utilize Microsoft's Exchange 2000 server.

"Our customers are very happy that we're listening to their requirements and bringing them the right solutions," says Garner.

...and Beyond Financial Services

The company is also expanding into other markets. There are a variety of other industries that face regulatory requirements for archiving of communications, including healthcare, insurance, and utilities. ZANTAZ has also launched a professional services division which helps tailor custom data archiving and retrieval solutions to individual businesses.

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