Aspera Partners With Omneon, Takes on Castify CDN

By Carl Lindemann

Aspera and Omneon are celebrating the NAB Show with a close partnership under which Omneon’s Castify content-distribution business unit is combined with Aspera’s transportation technology.

“This deal came through very fast,” says Aspera Marketing Director Francois Quereuil. “We just got along very well coming together to form a long-term partnership.”

Quereuil says the matchup makes perfect sense, allowing Omneon to focus on its core business: developing best-of-breed video servers and developing media storage. Meanwhile, marrying Aspera’s transportation know-how with content management is a natural.

“Castify is a tiger team of engineers based in Nice, France,” Quereuil says. “They have developed fantastic multicast technology combined with media-management tools.”

Aspera also unveiled v.2.5 of its fasp transportation technology for moving large files over wide area networks. Additions include a suite of desktop and browser-based transfer applications, enhanced automation, advanced scheduling capabilities, and adaptive disk-rate control for optimal end-to-end throughput.

Aspera is assuming ongoing development-engineering and operational responsibility for the Castify technology. Omneon will continue to market Castify’s ProCast CDN. Other first fruits of the deal will likely include integrating Aspera’s fasp transport technology with ProCast and Omneon APIs to speed content movement between Omneon systems.

Adding Omneon and Castify in the mix furthers Aspera’s promise, something much in demand given the current economic circumstances. Says Quereuil, “Our expertise is in being able to deliver content faster for clients without having them make an investment in infrastructure. They can simply move content more effectively without having to add new computers or to add bandwidth capacity.”