Aspera part of IBM’s plumbing in e-commerce

Talk at the IBM Corp’s Smarter Commerce conference this week was on how applications businesses would mine data for insight on how immediate online offers would turn indifferent shoppers into buyers. Plumbing is also a player in e-commerce as supported by IBM’s acquisition of its new Aspera file transfer division, a startup.

It has a FASP protocol that replaces FTP and HTTP when firing large files over wide area networks. As a new member it is constantly in interviews with reporters. Global TV, a Canadian network uses Aspera to enable news teams send video footage for editing. Bell Canada and Rogers Communications have also used Aspera for their video on demand streaming solutions.

The company’s co-founder and president Michelle Munson described Aspera as a technology that facilitated big data. Life sciences and energy firms have proved to be the firm's biggest clients though the company as a whole is hoping to broaden its base which was made possible when Aspera was bought by IBM.

Aspera was acquired to enable managed file transfer for emerging areas of large data and to have the capability to integrate with products made by IBM that are mainly data focused. Many of IBM’s marketing suites usually involve large data sets. This was pointed out while adding to the fact that more analytics were being done and transfer and availability were known to go hand in hand with that.

Some of its customers like Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola, needed to transfer large amount of videos and media rich files to advertising agents as well as stores as well as YouTube. Aspera has been created compatible to almost all server platforms be it, windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, IBM AIX, mackintosh and other cloud platforms file systems belonging to Openstack, Amazon s3, google storage, Akamai and Microsoft Azure. Files can therefore flow in and out at high speeds.

Plug-ins are available for mobile devices and one for web browsers which is known as Aspera connect. This helps browsers to offload file transfers to a company’s software. Aspera had previously not needed IBM’s funding for expansion but it went hand in hand with IBM’s strategy to deal in data and cloud solutions for organizations. IBM would like to place Aspera infrastructure as a service platform removing it from its previous third part position. The customers would have cost savings and the technology would be available for a wider range of organizations.

So, IBM is not just plumbing to cool its supercomputers, it is also plumbing into e-commerce through the acquisition of Aspera. :)