IBM confirmed its plans to acquire Aspera and to use the Emeryville-based company's technology to speed up the process of moving data across the globe,
The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has made a big move to boost transfer speeds of large amounts of data and feature-length movies. According to Aspera, its technology can reduce transmission time of large files and data sets by more than 99 percent. By calculations, a 24 gigabyte file that may take 26 hours to transfer can be transferred in less than 30 seconds.
Aspera counts big companies such as Apple and Netflix as its customers, where Apple uses Aspera for video uploads to the iTunes Store. The extra help gets its users to upload files within five minutes, which otherwise would take more than 3 hours.
"Our experience working with thousands of clients on Big Data projects tells us that companies can better compete and win when they can quickly extract value from massive volumes of data," John Mesberg, Vice President, B2B and Commerce Solutions, IBM, said in a press release. "With this acquisition, IBM addresses a key challenge for globally integrated enterprises by allowing them to move large data files much faster to the individuals who need them, wherever in the world they may be."
Aspera's software is built on "fasp," a protocol designed to overcome problems with TCP regardless of packet loss, latency or file size. The software is licensed to clients and partners either in the cloud or on premises. Customers include "virtually all the major broadcast television networks, Hollywood studios and CG/animation houses."
"Our team has redefined how the world's biggest data can be moved quickly, securely and reliably around the world," said Michelle Munson, president and co-founder, Aspera, in a statement. "By tapping into IBM's innovative capabilities and global resources, we will solve ever expanding data movement challenges for our customers now and in the future."
This acquisition builds on IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative by allowing businesses to accelerate their digital supply chains between partners and suppliers. This also extends IBM's capabilities in Managed File Transfer with a complementary set of capabilities to help enterprises further gain control and oversight of their data transfers.
The deal will come to its final closing in the first quarter of 2014.
