IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that international advertising and marketing agency Anomaly has adopted Aspera SaaS Platform along with Aspera Drive to power global creative collaboration and scalable digital asset management.
Anomaly required an asset management, exchange and distribution system that eliminated the cost and overhead of on-premises hardware, but also provided improved performance, security and scalability over traditional file sharing services that were too slow and could not adequately support the larger file sizes of their digital assets. Anomaly identified IBM Aspera file sharing and exchange solutions built on the FASP high-speed data transport technology as able to fulfill both the company’s internal and external needs.
“Technology is a force that is rapidly disrupting the way we do business,” said Jason DeLand, joint global CEO of Anomaly. “This positive disruption will enable clients, agencies and media publishers greater scale and intelligence. Our team at Anomaly searched far and wide for the best future positive solution, and IBM’s Aspera is in a class all its own.”
To create its internal solution, Anomaly adopted the Aspera Files SaaS platform, which extends high-speed transfer and sharing capabilities to cloud environments, completely agnostic to file types, sizes and volumes enabling fast transfers at distance. The solution includes Aspera Drive which allows users to browse, transfer, sync and exchange large digital assets that are stored in the cloud directly from within the users’ native Operating System. Anomaly worked closely with Aspera, providing valuable feedback which inspired Aspera to develop and add several new features to Aspera Drive, including:
- Check-in / Check-out for Collaborative Editing is a new check-out option in Drive that allows Anomaly users to check out digital assets and download their own local copy. Users can also check-in finished versions to upload the file at high speed and replace the master copy.
- Remote Share-to-Share transfer capabilities lets users easily “move” and “copy” files across cloud storage locations by dragging-and-dropping within the remote browsing view. This initiates local or around-the-world high speed transfers directly from the user’s desktop.
- OS X Finder Mount for Seamless Open and Save allows to open remote files directly in the corresponding local application for editing and to save files directly from their local applications back to the Aspera Drive with the option to then check in the file to upload back to the infrastructure.
In addition to these and a host of other capabilities, the Aspera Files platform offers a comprehensive set of robust APIs. Not only do the APIs allow for a seamless internal end-user application experience, they also provide easy integration into custom software development workflows. With the advent of big data in advertising and the need for brands to scale across diverse populations, Anomaly recognized a gap in creative intelligence capabilities, which led them to develop a new proprietary software platform leveraging custom digital asset management and advanced data collection and analysis technology. The output of the platform is a vast intelligence about content and consumer behavior that powers informed future creative plans and digital asset decisions, directly addressing the business problems of clients.
“The Aspera deployment at Anomaly has been an inspiring process,” said Michelle Munson, CEO at IBM Aspera. “The vision of our customers often drives our innovation. In this case, with Aspera Files and Drive as a starting point to achieve fast, easy, scalable media content exchange, we partnered with Anomaly to extend our APIs and feature set to enable new collaboration workflows that are faster and easier to use and fit directly into the creative process to invent brand new ways of managing and providing media.”
Aspera is demonstrating Aspera Files Saas and the Aspera Multi-Cloud High-Speed Transfer Service, alongside its entire portfolio of high-speed file transfer, sharing and exchange solutions at NAB 2017 taking place April 24-27 in Las Vegas at Booth SL8124.
