Parallels Summit 2012: Q&A, Birger Steen

Compare that to what happens to someone serving millions of small business like GoDaddy and 1&1. If you send out the wrong invoice batch You've got 10 million businesses and every day you send out 300,000 invoices, that's a lot of stuff to roll back, particularly if it goes through the channel. The sales process has to be zero cost, frictionless, self-served. There's no dinner, no Accenture consultant, there's no nothing. You need to build a system that can handle millions and millions of transactions with high reliability between legal entities and in a very agile way.

So, it's a different set of requirements and a market most people haven't cared about so we're in a pretty good position. We're paranoid though and we expect there to be competition.

The event has, understandably, focused on Parallels' technology, but what's the key technology Parallels would not be able to live without?

Coffee and email! As consumers of technology our own web presence is incredibly important to us. We're a brand that's punching a few classes above our own weight. Part of that is we have a strong web presence. Certainly email, conference call, telepresence, those are all technologies that are key to us as we're such a distributed company. We're also very much an SMB ourselves.