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Published July 20, 2004

Volume 12, Number 7

ZANTAZ Launches New Archive Tools for Email Management
Company also expands presence in Hacienda with additional 11,281 square foot lease

Steve King

Steve King, president and CEO of Zantaz, has led his company to rapid growth in recent years.

By George Walsh
Special to NETWORK

ZANTAZ, a developer of electronic communications management tools that address Securities and Exchange Commission and major stock exchange compliance requirements, electronic discovery, and storage management, recently announced its new Hosted Exchange Archive Solution (EAS), a new managed service for enterprise-level email management.

The ability to retrieve archived correspondence and other data is especially important to companies that need to comply with requirements put in place by the SEC, NYSE, and NASD. “If you are in a field that must comply with those requirements and you don’t, there can be serious consequences, from fines to damaged corporate reputation, reduced shareholder value, and potentially even criminal charges,” Olson says. “We are experts in that area, and there are many companies, including 14 of the top 20 Wall Street securities firms, that are our customers for that reason. We ensure our customers are compliant.” In addition to email, companies now even need to keep records of instant messages sent from one computer to the other and perform data-discovery operations, where they need to locate relevant files or correspondences related to specific topics.

“We have both a set of hosted solutions in our data centers and a set of onsite applications for doing email archiving and other related functions like email management,” says Craig Olson, vice president of marketing for ZANTAZ. “We are unique in providing customers an option, the flexibility to be able to choose whether they want to keep their archived email and other data on their own servers or on ours, based on their resources and needs.”

ZANTAZ’ EAS is based on the acquisition of Ottawa-based company EDUCOM TS. EAS, originally an onsite archiving application, was transformed by ZANTAZ into a means of storing data off-site. Often, the corporate computer servers become overloaded due to the high number of email messages they need to store. With Hosted EAS, that data can be offloaded onto a separate storage device. ZANTAZ, in fact, offers massive amounts of storage space to companies in its own data centers.

“Hosted EAS also allows users to take advantage of moving data into an EAS platform from old optical devices or tape into a new storage device. There are a lot of companies that are tired of having to deal with these older technologies and are trying to consolidate their data into one format,” Olson says.

ZANTAZ, headquartered at 5671 Gibraltar Dr., also recently leased 11,281 square feet of additional office space at 4234 Hacienda Dr. Despite the fact that ZANTAZ’ data center is moving out of Pleasanton and into locations in Sacramento and Las Vegas, the company still needed more space. “The reason we moved part of our operation into the new facility here on Hacienda Drive—in addition to maintaining our corporate headquarters on Gibraltar Drive—is due to our rate of growth,” Olson says. “During the last two years in a row, we’ve grown 300% per year. This year, we’ll be doubling in size again. The expansion was simply a matter of running out of room for the people that we’re hiring.”

Media Lario Expands Optical Component Business into Park
Company's new Hacienda location will focus on moving optics efforts in chip making

(Left to right) Boris Relja, Giovanni Nocerino, Ph.D., and Tim Welch are growing Media Lario's business on two continents.

By George Walsh
Special to NETWORK

Media Lario, a manufacturer of high accuracy optical components and systems, opened a new location at 4309 Hacienda Dr. last month. Media Lario’s optical components have been used in numerous applications in the areas of scientific equipment for X-ray, optical, and radio frequency applications used by the global space and defense sector. The company achieved technological success with the manufacturing and integration of the X-ray telescopes for the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA Swift space-borne observatories. The company has also had success in developing special telescopes for “free space” communications that can be directly coupled to fiber optic networks. Free-space optical communication involves the use of optical links across the space between two points, either within the Earth's atmosphere or in outer space, for data or voice communication.

“The company got its start 10 years ago by supplying specialized optics primarily for space applications like hyperstation telescopes,” says Tim Welch, CFO of Media Lario. “Last December, the company made a transition where we raised some venture capital and we’re now trying to take our optics technology and move it into chip making. We’ll maintain the space business and, in addition, we will be a component and subsystem supplier into what’s called the lithography portion of semiconductor capital equipment. For example, we’ll be selling to people like Nikon and Canon who perform the lithography step of chip making.”

Lithography is a step in chip making where a light is shined through the equivalent of a film negative that contains a map of the circuits needed on the chip to create an image on the silicon wafers of which chips are comprised. To make the feature sizes on chips smaller and smaller, chip makers are now using wavelengths of light so small that they are having difficulty passing the light through a lens through the negative to create the image on the silicon. So, they have to move from what’s called refractive optics using a lens to reflective optics using mirrors to create the image. Reflective optics are one of Media Lario’s specialties. “The company has created specialized optics technology that we’ve successfully used in telescopes in the past and we plan to use to them move just as successfully into the semiconductor industry,” Welch says.

Media Lario, based in Italy, is privately owned by its management as well as a group of international venture capital organizations including Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet Ventures, Intel Capital, TLcom Capital Partners, Vision Capital, and PolyTechnos. Media Lario has currently operations in Luxembourg, Italy, and the United States.

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