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IBM Acquires Aspera

IBM_-_Aspera


IBM
has completed its acquisition of Aspera, Inc., a privately held company that accelerates the secure transfer of large files and data. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Using its patented fasp protocol, which is designed to break the bottlenecks inherent in broadband networks, Aspera can reduce the transmission time of a 24 gigabyte file being delivered halfway around the world from 26 hours to 30 seconds, according to a company press release. The fasp technology is licensed to cloud computing service companies, and will be integrated with IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure in 2014.  

IBM plans to double the amount of data centers running on SoftLayer architecture — from 20 to 40 — during the next year. To achieve this goal, the company plans to invest $1.2 billion in its cloud business.

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With the acquisition, IBM will be equipped to build upon its Smarter Commerce initiative by empowering businesses to accelerate digital supply chains between partners and suppliers. The company also will be able to add a complementary set of capabilities to its Managed File Transfer in order to help enterprises further gain control of data transfers. 

“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 of Industry Cloud Solutions at 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.”

Analyst groups consider the Aspera acquisition to be a highly “strategic move” for IBM, as it acknowledges “the need of enterprises to move large files quickly, reliably and securely across the Internet,” said Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst of Constellation Research. “Given today’s announcement by IBM to invest $1.2 billion into its cloud infrastructure, the playground for Aspera’s services will be larger than ever. We expect IBM to quickly leverage Aspera in a similar manner to the recently acquired SoftLayer assets that form the backbone of its cloud infrastructure.”

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