Kon Leong, founder of Silicon Valley company ZL Technologies, says Concordia provided him solid grounding even though the field has changed greatly over the past three and a half decades.
Two decades after graduating, Leong co-founded ZL Technologies, which is located in Milpitas, Calif. — part of what’s known the world over as Silicon Valley. The company is now widely recognized as a leader in enterprise information archiving.
With big-name partnerships ranging from Microsoft to IBM, Leong is now president and CEO of a company that got its foot in the digital archiving door before it became such a crucial component of today’s large-scale enterprises and institutions.
However, his life took a few twists and turns before ZL Technologies got off the ground.
Leong’s parents are from mainland China, although he was born and raised in India. After studying for a year at the Indian Institute of Technology, he immigrated to Canada at age 18 and enrolled in what was then Loyola College, one of Concordia’s founding institutions.
He graduated with a degree in business and computer science from Concordia and went into the field of data processing, now known as information technology (IT).
In the two decades that followed his Concordia graduation, Leong had a hand in a few technology startups that didn’t quite take hold. Along the way he earned his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia and then spent a decade on Wall Street working as an investment banker.
However, his passion for technology never wavered.
ZL Technologies was founded in 1999 as Ziplip. The company’s principal product, Unified Archive, is a single-platform tool used by enterprises to consolidate information into a unified platform that complies with laws, protects data and enables users to more easily navigate across data silos. With about 120 employees, Leong describes the company as “quite long in the tooth by Silicon Valley standards.”
Leong says large enterprises have massive amounts of unarchived, widely-dispersed information ranging from voicemails to emails. That poorly archived, disorganized information cannot easily be searched through and it is often unsecured. Leong, seeing this growing problem, co-developed from the ground up a company and software that offers a solution.
“Enterprises are finding out that they really need to get their arms around this,” says Leong, noting unsecured data is being targeted by lawsuits and government officials looking to mine this wealth of information.
“All enterprises and organizations need to keep tabs on their electronic records as business records, such as contracts or human resources reviews, which simply must be preserved according to a certain protocol. If you don’t have a records or information management program, then you’re really not a business or a true organization.”
From paper to digital
Leong says record keeping was always managed in hard copy, but now companies are going digital. Lawmakers worldwide have decreed that electronic data shall be treated as hard evidence, Leong explains, and this has spurred a global shift toward securely archiving and organizing information.
However, transferring everything, especially unstructured information, to electronic data is not as simple as a few clicks of the mouse. Many companies and organizations, Leong explains, “are just catching up now. These are problems that need to be addressed.” He calls it “the second coming of IT.”
“We represent the new generation of information management,” says Leong, noting his software platform is delivered as a product or a cloud service. “It’s never been done before.”
Leong says software has changed completely from his Concordia days in the 1970s. They are now “much more open sourced — much more componentized — much easier to scale up and borrow across the board and reuse,” he says.
“Everything is on a common framework, so you can actually access any application on the web. That was unthinkable in my day where everything was proprietary and closed.”
Since the late 1970s, Leong adds, the early fundamentals of computer science and architecture have been lost with time. He believes students today aren’t looking “under the cover” at the underlying makeup of computing operations and how those operations work.
“Relational database was a brand-new topic on campus then and the curriculum emphasized the physical and logical,” Leong recalls. “I thought that was a very, very good grounding. Students today don’t really know about the physical aspects of databases and are, therefore, less adept at scaling.”
Those lessons, though nearly four decades old, stay with him to this day, he says.
“I have extremely positive memories of Concordia,” he says.
“The administration treated me well. I needed some flexibility and they flexed. The campus and learning experience was very positive. I look forward to giving back to Concordia.”
#CUalumni
Related links