IBM today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Aspera, a privately held company based in Emeryville, California. This provides IBM with new and complementary capabilities to better enable companies to move Big Data, on premise or in the cloud, at global distances with the speed required by today’s business.

Aspera’s patented extreme file transfer technology accelerates the secure transfer of large files and large collections of files by up to 99.9 percent – reducing a 26 hour transmission of a 24 gigabyte file, sent halfway around the world, down to just 30 seconds. This speed is powered by Aspera’s patented” fasp protocol”, which breaks the bottlenecks inherent in broadband networks to achieve high performance, efficiency and security in the most difficult WAN environments. Recently awarded an Emmy for engineering, Aspera is used at virtually every major Hollywood studio, cable provider and pharmaceutical company with leading brands such as Netflix, PBS and Universal Studios.