Flexibility in supporting a range of architectures has been important for NetApp’s appeal to customers and partners, including VirtuStream, who’s been able to extend the benefits to its string of Fortune 500 companies.  Today we hear from Simon Aspinall, the chief marketing officer of the up-and-coming cloud service provider. Wikibon Founder Dave Vellante chatted up the VirtuStream executive at the NetApp Customer Day event at VMworld 2012 – watch the full interview below.

Aspinall started by talking a bit about his company and what it has to offer. VirtuStream is essentially an AWS competitor that caters specifically to large enterprises. The firm handles security and compliance for these big name customers’ apps, making the cloud a viable alternative to their own data center. The focus is on mission-critical software: legacy applications from Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

In addition to the managed aspect Aspinall is also touting all the standard cloud advantages: these apps can run faster, scale better and become a lot more accessible when running in VirtuStream’s environment. Clients can also realize a 40 percent reduction in overheads, the CMO says.

According to Aspinall, NetApp’s solutions are a key part of his company’s backend infrastructure. The cloud provider leverages the user’s data protection and backup and recovery solutions, as well as clustering. NetApp’s support for this architecture means that VirtuStream can offer better SLAs to its customers, which include Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies according to the exec.

Aspinall expanded on how his company differentiates itself from other vendors. He stresses that in addition to the business advantages VirtuStream also gives enterprises the ability to create hybrid environments: applications and data can run in a private cloud, remotely, or moved back and forth. Users can mix and -match, in Aspinall’s words, a level of unique that is fairly unique in the market.

The discussed wrapped with a little reveal of the company’s performance. The CMO says that it saw sales double last quarter on a year-over-year basis, and he expects this momentum to persist through the next quarter thanks to an influx of new customers.