IBM completes Aspera acquisition, poised to move big data more quickly

IBM announced January 17 that it has completed the acquisition of Aspera, a privately held company that securely speeds the movement of massive data files around the world. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

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. 

Traditional network protocols limit the speed and reliability of moving Big Data to where it is needed most. Large data transfers can take hours or days by traditional methods and can be compromised by security issues. Aspera makes cloud computing even faster, more predictable and more cost effective for Big Data transfers such as enterprise storage, sharing virtual images or bursting to the cloud for increased computing capacity. 

Aspera's technology accelerates the secure transfer of large files or data sets by up to 99.9%, potentially slashing a 26-hour transmission of a 24 GB file sent halfway around the world to just 30 seconds. Aspera's patented fasp protocol breaks the bottlenecks inherent in broadband networks to deliver high performance, efficiency and security in WAN environments. This also gives customers a more efficient way to transport data to and from cloud networks.
 
"Aspera solves critical challenges at the intersection of two of the most influential trends driving business today - Big Data and cloud computing," said Craig Hayman, GM, Industry Cloud Solutions, IBM. "With this acquisition, IBM will help our customers more effectively and efficiently move large files to and from the cloud and within the enterprise to where individuals can extract real business insights from that data."

Aspera recently received an Emmy award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development, in which the academy commented that fasp is "an industry game changer" used by "virtually all the major broadcast television networks, Hollywood studios and CG/animation houses." Aspera's fasp technology is licensed to many leading cloud computing services and will be integrated with IBM's recently acquired SoftLayer cloud infrastructure later this year. 
  
Learn more about Aspera here. 

Read more about IBM's Softlayer plans in Asia here.