IBM announced Thursday an agreement to acquire Aspera, an Emeryville, California-based company whose technology speeds up movement of massive data files across the Internet, for an undisclosed amount.

Licensed to clients and partners either in the cloud or on premise, Aspera's patented technology reduces transmission times for large files or data sets by up to 99.9% – potentially cutting a 26 hour transfer of a 24 gigabyte file, sent halfway around the world, down to just 30 seconds, according to IBM.

Called fasp, the technology overcomes inherent bottlenecks in broadband wide area networks that slow the transfer of extremely large files, such as high-definition video or scientific research files, over distance. Typical data transfers over TCP/IP are hampered by network delays or packet loss, even over the fastest broadband networks, according to IBM.

Industries that benefit from such technology life sciences, media and gaming. It also has application in the enterprise, where users want to synchronize large files over distance between multiple devices.

John Mesberg, VP of B2B and commerce solutions at IBM, said, “With this acquisition, IBM addresses a key challenge for globally integrated enterprises by allowing them to move large data files much faster to the individuals who need them, wherever in the world they may be.”

IBM said it will integrate fasp into the cloud infrastructure of its recently acquired provider SoftLayer in 2014.