10 questions for Mimecast CFO Peter Campbell

Name: Peter Campbell

Age: 47

Time with company: 5 years

Education: Bachelor of Commerce in accounting from Concordia University in Montreal; graduate degree in accounting from Concordia; Chartered Accountant Designation with the Canadian Order of Chartered Accountants.

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Name: Peter Campbell

Age: 47

Time with company: 5 years

Education: Bachelor of Commerce in accounting from Concordia University in Montreal; graduate degree in accounting from Concordia; Chartered Accountant Designation with the Canadian Order of Chartered Accountants.

Company headquarters: London

Number of countries: Offices in five -- the U.S., South Africa and U.K. are main offices, other offices in the Middle East and offshore

Number of employees total: 260

Number of employees the CFO oversees: 28

About the company: Mimecast provides cloud-based email security, continuity, policy control and archiving. Last year, it ranked fifth on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA ranking of the fastest-growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and third in Deloitte's rankings for the U.K.

1. Where did you start in finance and what experiences led you to the job you have today?

My first finance job was at Ernst & Young in their tech group and that was back in the boom days. I did a lot of IPOs and had a lot of public company clients. I moved on to a company in Montreal called SR Telecom, which was a publicly listed company in Canada with 600 people, 200 million in revenue. While I was there, we did an acquisition of Netro, a company out of Palo Alto, California. We did an F3 filing and became listed on Nasdaq. Then I moved off to a smaller public company in Montreal. I was there for a little while, but they called me up at SR Telecom and asked me to take the CFO position, so I moved back there as CFO. At the time, I had a friend who worked for a company called Mimecast and he introduced me to the two founders and we hit it off pretty well. SR was struggling then ... so I moved here in 2006 and I've been here ever since.

2. Who was an influential boss for you and what lessons did they teach you about management and leadership?

When I was at Ernst & Young, I had a boss called Rod Budd -- he had 30 years in the business and I was just starting out. I was quite a lot more impressionable and less jaded ... Ernst & Young is really a slog, we worked real hard, we worked a lot of long hours. I worked a thousand hours of overtime a year and he worked really hard too. You had a lot of partners who would go off and leave everyone else to do the overtime. One weekend that I was working, my girlfriend -- my wife now -- called me because my dog was having an epileptic fit and she was really upset. He heard my side of the phone call and said, let's go. And he drove me home because I didn't have a car then. He taught me that family always comes first. That created a great deal of loyalty in me for him at the time.

The dog was fine. She was epileptic, however.

3. What are the biggest challenges facing CFOs today?

I think the thing for me is that things are changing all the time. CFOs like predictability, but technology is changing, the way people work is changing. ... In particular for us, in a SaaS business, in a cloud business, there's not an established paradigm for that right now. From a finance point of view, you're turning it around like Rubik's cube -- how can I adapt this? There are still a lot of people who look at SaaS like a traditional business, but it's not the same thing. [As a CFO], you're looking at it and figuring out ways to shape something new.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.