Profile: The man behind Saasu

Marc Lehmann, CEO of cloud accounting program Saasu, has a strong history in the numbers game. A former investment banker, he spent five years as principal trader and vice president of Deutsche Bank before setting up Saasu 10 years ago.

Lehmann (pictured on right) told BoxFreeIT how the company focused first on speed and security before looks, its priority on saving time for business owners, and why it’s staying out of a US “bloodbath”.

BoxFreeIT: How many customers do you have in Australia?

Marc Lehmann: I try not to look at the numbers. We crossed over 20,000 customers a while ago. We have over 1,000 accountants using the system, the majority of them are partners.

There are only about 7,000 to 8,000 accountants in Australia, and anything above 10 percent is great at this stage in the game.

Our business is literally doubling in size each year still. I see more of an acceleration this year because there is a bunch of competitors selling the concept to the market. We’re sitting out there with a very rich feature set and we get to coattail off that marketing.

That won't last forever but it's been really good for us. One of our investors made a comment to me a couple of years ago that I thought wasn’t right but has subsequently proven to be true. He said that the best thing that could happen to our company was to have a few competitors come in and sell the concept of cloud computing and cloud accounting to the marketplace. And it’s been very true.

BoxFreeIT: Who are your biggest competitors in the Australian market?

Lehmann: MYOB and Quicken, because they have such big customer bases. After that it's the strong online companies such as MYOB Live Accounts, Xero.

FreshBooks also has a good presence.They are the one to watch globally. They own the early adopters in the (United) States and it's making it tough for competitors to move to the States because they are so well established.

The big one is what is going to happen with Bane Capital (which just acquired MYOB).

BoxFreeIT: Do you think MYOB’s plan to host its software on Microsoft’s Azure data centre will work?

Lehmann: Anything hybrid that steps halfway is always going to be under threat from products that are purely web based and the advantages that come with that. There really has been no good argument against (the superiority of web based apps). People have thrown up security and managing your own data.

But when you look at it security doesn't stack up as a risk, and managing data doesn't stack up from a total cost of ownership and a risk and redundancy perspective. You're basically backing that you’re going to do it cheaper and safer and more reliably than a cloud provider.

But if you look at the volume of cloud based apps out there, they’re actually very reliable and safe right now.