Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you say that it changes the paradigm, are you talking from the perspective of speed, or also from the perspective of what can be done and what problems can be solved?

Kon Leong: Both and more. The world of e-discovery still hasn’t passed through the impact of being able to have a single platform, unified in all aspects, with all of the capabilities of e-discovery built in, so that you never have to move data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It is coherence of the data and coherence of the search engine´s structure as well that operates on that data.

Kon Leong: Yes. The retention policy has to be coherent. If each title is just throwing away data, it is a meaningless system. These are just some of the differentiations. We could go on – there is a huge list. But those are two of the key differentiators. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies (Part 3)

KL: Yes. You said you covered a lot of unstructured data, and you have talked to a lot of companies like Autonomy, for example. I would venture to say that this field has nothing well understood. Because of the misunderstanding, practically all of the implementation of large enterprises is [set up] to fail. This snippet of wisdom is critical and has been missed by practically all of the vendors. I have not heard any of them mention this, and many of the installations are getting burned by this oversight. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies (Part 2)

Kon Leong: One customer is in the financial sector – Wells Fargo. All enterprises struggle with unstructured data, and typically they come from various areas to manage the proliferation of data and the duplication of data, which impacts storage, manage data for compliance – regulations require them to keep certain data and to be able to access it and produce it on demand. The SEC certainly has strict requirements on retention and production of data on demand. These agencies all require correspondence between brokers and clients to be readily accessible. That compliance is another need. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies (Part 1)

Kon Leong is the chief executive officer of ZL Technologies. He studied at the IIT in Bombay, holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a degree in computer science from Concordia University. He spent more than eight years in various IT management and engineering positions and has created several successful startups, such as GigaLabs, a vendor of high-speed networking switches. In this interview Kon goes into detail about the unstructured data space and talks about the trend of merging structured with unstructured data. Furthermore, he shares with us his interesting views of the future of this space.

Sramana Mitra: Kon, let’s start with some of your background as well as an introduction to ZL Technologies. What do you do and what trends are you leading? >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2 (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That is a great story. It says a lot about Cameron’s interest in funding you, and also that they really were a value-added firm.

Adriaan van Wyck: It has been fascinating. It is something that is not typical for VCs – sometimes they have to get out funds, there is pressure, you have to start changing what you do for the sake of VCs, etc. We just never had that pressure from Cameron. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The way your customer map has developed so far, how does that distribute among large customers, mid-sized customers and small customers?

Adriaan van Wyck: There is a fascinating trend there. A 100- to 150-employee organization is where we become relevant. We have smaller organizations that use our software as well. In terms of revenue, between medium and large organizations, it is a 50/50 split. However, if you look at the count, we have many more customers in the medium range than in the large space. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise any financing in the early phase of your company?

Adriaan van Wyck: When we started to become successful in Asia and in the U.S. – Merrill Lynch and Intel were early customers – the company was growing at a pace the three individuals couldn’t keep up with. We took some early investment out of South Africa. I was very anti-VC because I wanted to run the company our own way and didn’t want people involved in the business who didn’t understand the essence of the business. That was my perception of VC at that point – rightly or wrongly. But we did involve a VC called TriCo out of South Africa. >>>