At the recent e2.0 event in Boston I was able to sit down with LeapFILE Founder and CEO Peter Chang to talk about his latest venture, Oxygen Cloud. Oxygen Cloud takes LeapFILE's basic concepts of extremely simple, secure file transfer for the enterprise and applies them to cloud storage. With LeapFILE's pedigree, a profitable company that Chang bootstrapped, Oxygen Cloud launches with strong foundations (beta available this month).

So what's the problem that Oxygen Cloud solves? Collaboration over shared files has never been easy and in our current business environment, as data and information explode, the problem gets even bigger. I want to make a clear distinction here though, I think there are at least 2 major problems that collaboration systems need to address (not necessarily that every system will address both though), file-centric collaboration and people-centric collaboration. File-centric systems are not new, and employees have used a wide variety of ways to share and work together on files ranging from email systems to content management systems. People-centric collaboration is a relatively new concept and can be seen in systems like Novell Pulse, salesforce.com Chatter and SociaCast. Oxygen Cloud is focused on file-centric collaboration and cloud storage.

There are a lot of file-centric collaboration solutions so why do I think Oxygen Cloud is interesting? It's the application of the underlying principles from LeapFILE to the collaboration and cloud storage problems, as well as the concept of combining the two into one solution that could propel Oxygen Cloud ahead of the pack. According to Chang people don't do work in the cloud, they work on their desktop. I suppose I mostly agree to that, with a few exceptions like Google Docs or MS Office Online. One of LeapFILE's biggest advantages is that it takes a process that can seem rather complex (using FTP sites, for example) and makes them flat out simple and natural by performing the complex "under the covers". Oxygen Cloud promised to do the same for file-centric collaboration and cloud storage through a seamless desktop app / cloud storage solution.

Oxygen Cloud does one more important function though, it is storage provider agnostic. This means that it turns into a sort of storage broker for the enterprise, allowing IT to connect to their cloud storage solution of choice, public or private. This added flexibility of choice is extremely important in the enterprise, where IT organizations are struggling to balance end user ease of use and experience with growing concerns over security and IP protection. On the public cloud IT could use any storage provider including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and IronMountain or opt to create their own private cloud. To help facilitate this process Oxygen Cloud has partnered with Data Robotics.

The product is scheduled to be available in beta this July so I haven't actually seen or used it. If Chang's team can simplify aggregated file-centric collaboration and cloud storage into a positive desktop experience that makes the process natural and intuitive then I'd say they have another winner.

Tags: collaboration, storage, cloud, software, technology, e2.0, social business