As HBO’s Christian Wilson urged me to do on Sunday, I stopped by the Aspera booth (SU15509) this morning to learn more about that company’s high-speed file transfer software suite. I was fortunate to run into Michelle Munson, Aspera’s president and co-founder, while I was there, and she filled me in on the company’s story.

While the technical explanation of how Aspera’s “fasp 2.0″ software suite addresses the twin issues of speed and ultra-security for major entertainment clients like HBO, Technicolor, Ascent Media, EFilm, and many others–most of whom are building Aspera, one way or another, into their larger digital asset management suite of tools–is interesting and important, I was most struck by another part of the story Munson addressed.

That part of the story revolves around the fact that the entertainment industry generally has joined major government institutions, including the Department of Defense, in essentially driving the development of Aspera’s products by evolving and changing their own workflows, increasing the type, size, and amount of data they are producing and moving from one location to the next, and giving continual input back to the company. This notion of user-driven development is nothing new in many different categories of products, but Munson suggests it is happening with unusual speed and aggressiveness at Aspera. The company launched five years ago at NAB, signed up Warner Bros. as its second client, and since then, according to Munson, the entertainment industry has essentially become the most significant driver for what Aspera does.

“And now, we have the video on demand networks like Comcast, DirecTV, Verizon, and EchoStar getting involved, and the new online aggregation companies like iTunes are also coming to us to solve data transfer issues,” says Munson. “The industry is also recognizing the need to find green alternatives to how they used to ship materials around, so our timing for all this has been great.”

Indeed, on the Green front, Munson told me a story about a Defense Department unit recently adopting Aspera into a larger, global data transfer network and finally ceasing the flying, at taxpayer expense, of DVD’s, CD’s, and hard drives across the ocean each week in military transport planes in order to keep that data ultra-secure.

Next, says Munson, Aspera wants to address the issue of “massive global inter-company transfer scenarios at a much larger scale.”

So, as Christian suggested to me, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on Aspera in the next couple of years.

– MG