Emeryville, CA, December 19, 2007 -- Aspera, creator of revolutionary high speed transfer technology, Fasp™ 2.0, today announced that Jim Atkinson, a former Autodesk executive, has joined the company as Vice President of Worldwide Sales, effective immediately. Atkinson joins Sr. Vice President of Sales and Business Development Cary Capece in leading all aspects of Aspera’s strategic sales and business development. Atkinson will be responsible for direct, channel, and international sales of Aspera’s industry-leading high-speed file transfer products and will collaborate with Capece to lead a strategic expansion of Aspera’s business efforts worldwide in 2008.

Atkinson’s joining comes at the conclusion of a record year of deployment for Aspera’s software, now deployed at all Hollywood Studios and all major broadcasters in the US, as well as many online portals, cable/MSO’s and content delivery networks.

“Adding Jim has been a wonderful capstone to an amazing year here at Aspera,” said Michelle Munson, President and co-founder of Aspera. “We are grateful to our customers, who have helped us grow and develop our technology and products, and thrilled to have Jim on board at this time to help us to bring the products to a broader community.”

Atkinson comes to Aspera from Autodesk, where he was the Director M&E Software Americas, responsible for all media and entertainment software business in the Americas. In this role he managed a team of sales, channels, and technical personnel responsible for more than $69 million in sales of software and services to the entertainment and visualization markets. As an industry veteran with more than 18 years building successful sales, distribution and sales support organizations, Atkinson joins Sr. Vice President of Sales and Business Development Cary Capece in driving the strategic expansion of Aspera’s sales and marketing worldwide. In 2008 he will be building new channels domestically and internationally, further developing Aspera’s partnerships with industry leaders in storage, IT services and digital asset management, and helping build the long-term growth strategy for Aspera.

“Aspera has a deep, innovative core technology that solves a fundamental problem in the industry,” said Atkinson. “The team is expert in the area, and is dedicated to not only the theoretical breakthrough of high-speed transport, but also to solving customer problems with outstanding products and engineering.”

Current customers, including several leading film production studios, have found that TCP acceleration appliances work very well for enterprise applications – SAP, email, eRooms, etc. However, they report these tools are “Not even close to Aspera for moving files ... nothing we've tried is.” One studio reported 300 Mbps transfers between Burbank and Japan, saying that “the transfer could have gone even faster but the gear at the other end was limited." As WAN bandwidths have continued to increase, Aspera has digital media customers now transferring data at over 1.2 Gbps using a single fasp transport stream.

Aspera’s total number of deployed server and endpoint licenses is now nearing 4,000. "The feedback we're receiving from our studio, broadcaster, MSO, and CDN customers is that our products consistently and significantly out-perform other acceleration strategies in terms of file transfer speed and bandwidth control, and in combination with our flexible SDK platform, and now centralized and end-to-end management and tracking capabilities, are being consistently chosen over alternatives," said Munson.

"The work we've put in over the past four years to understand and solve the problem of high-speed transport is helping to drive this adoption,” said Serban Simu, Aspera Co-founder and Vice President Engineering. “Our aim is to create a software platform for high-speed file transfer that can be universally applied for business critical applications, with the digital media supply chain informing our development. We have invested our profits to build a bigger and even more capable team, and are applying the same engineering approach to take on the remaining technical challenges.“

About Aspera

Aspera Inc. is a software development company creating innovative high-performance bulk data transport technologies that provide maximum speed, complete security and breakthrough bandwidth control at global distances. With several thousand endpoint and server licenses installed world wide, Aspera’s fasp™ software products are becoming the industry standard for high-speed transfer of digital content in the media and entertainment marketplace and the technology of choice for enterprise-wide deployment for Fortune 500 companies. For more information, please visit www.asperasoft.com