Despite the undeniable uptake that applications hosted externally of enterprises has had, the reality remains that CIOs are wanting to keep some applications in-house. Whether it’s because of sunk costs or concerns about security, some workloads will remain within the enterprise firewall for the time being. smart CIOs however want to leverage existing assets in ways that gives them more flexibility, and answers their users demands – demands for accessibility, ease of use and friendly user experience.

One company that has focused on this part of the market is Oxygen Cloud, a vendor that has had a pivot or two over the years but is now concentrating on giving CIOs the ability to leverage existing storage assets (in this case EMC Atmos storage) but to deliver a Dropbox-like experience that is familiar to users.

Oxygen Cloud has just managed to convince ING Direct Canada to roll out its product – initially ING made the interesting decision to roll Oxygen Cloud out to it’s board members and senior executive team, deciding to do so partially because this was where the real business use existed, but also as an excellent test case – if non-technical board members couldn’t use the product – then it wasn’t going to work more broadly through the organization.

This limited roll out to executives, board members and IT may well be be followed by a more general toll out across all of ING Direct Canada and ultimately ING Globally – if Oxygen Cloud manages to pull this of it will be an excellent validation for the “bringing agility and ease of use to existing storage” story.

Oxygen Cloud interviewed ING Direct Canada’s CIO, Charaka Kithulegoda, to get his take on the decision making process to move use their product – It’s an interesting glimpse into the thought process of corporate IT.