(Skytap Photo)

Fast-growing Seattle startup Skytap will now offer its customers the choice of running their workloads on Amazon Web Services in addition to Skytap’s own cloud, as it looks to build on its growing revenue.

Skytap helps companies with legacy applications take advantage of the flexibility of cloud computing by replicating their data center environments within its own cloud, and it has tripled its revenue over the last three years. Now in addition to its own cloud and an existing relationship with IBM’s cloud unit, it will offer customers the option of running those workloads on AWS starting in the first half of 2018, said Dan Jones, director of product development at Skytap.

Here’s how it works: Skytap will still do all the work to move a customer’s on-premises application into its own cloud, and then should the customer want to take advantage of a capability offered by AWS, Skytap will build a “bridge component” that uses an API to connect to the customer’s application and the cloud provider, Jones said.

Neil Holloway, senior vice president of business development, Skytap (Skytap Photo)

“We’re seeing this emerging pattern among our customer base; they have this traditional app, (with) decades of investment in it, but there are capabilities residing up in AWS that they want to take advantage of,” Jones said. Skytap is starting with AWS, but it will explore adding other clouds to the mix if there are a significant number of customers that want something provided by another cloud vendor, he said.

It’s quite likely one of those clouds will be Azure, now that Skytap has hired Neil Holloway as senior vice president of business development. Holloway will be charged with building out Skytap’s relationships with other cloud vendors after a 27-year career at Microsoft, most recently as head of sales for Microsoft Business Solutions.

“The product-market fit is a great one,” Holloway said, referring to Skytap’s strategy of helping companies that aren’t great at tech take advantage of modern cloud computing and software development strategies. “The key theme around all our customers is, how do they transform their business?”

Skytap just raised a $45 million funding round this summer, bringing the total amount of money raised by the 11-year-old Pioneer Square company to $109.5 million.

Holloway joins fellow Microsoft veteran Wayne Morris, who joined the company as chief marketing officer in April.

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