How Mersy delivers analytics to France's largest groups under its own brand

Mersy is a French company founded and run by Stéphane Feuillu, working on the management and cost optimization of IT contracts, with a focus on software contracts, for large corporations. The proposition is a specific one: to produce substantial gains on the software purchasing line, a high-value service built on what the company calls its Bureau des licences, the licensing office that is the result of ten years of expertise, accumulated experience and purpose-built tools, and which is entirely self-financed. In practice Mersy works alongside finance, IT and procurement directors to eliminate non-compliance risk and improve pre-tax results.

Its client base is concentrated in the CAC 40, the SBF 120 and the ETI, France's mid-sized companies, with organizations of more than five thousand employees, some of them operating worldwide and with complex organizational structures, and there is a move under way to serve the one-to-five-thousand-employee range as well. A single Mersy client can involve ten thousand users, which gives the measure of the distribution problem the company needed to solve.

Mersy's work depends on collecting and manipulating large volumes of software usage data to understand consumption behaviour and translate it into optimization recommendations, and that manipulation required a BI tool able to turn technical data into something understandable, a role Qlik Sense took on.

The problem showed up at the next step. The dashboards reached the more prepared contacts inside each client well, and those contacts had to carry the information to the rest of their teams — people with no familiarity with analytical tools, whom Mersy, being a small company, was in no position to train. Stéphane concluded that the interface had to look like an ordinary website, with navigation anyone would understand at first contact, and started looking for someone who could build that, which led him to Cluster.

What he says about that decision is worth recording, because it is the kind of thing usually left out of a case study and matters a great deal to anyone evaluating a supplier. He describes the discomfort of being a small company starting a relationship with a partner on the other side of the Atlantic, says the question was discussed openly before they began, and says he found no other supplier that combined the same technical command with the same level of service.

NewHub became the consumption layer Mersy's clients access, entering through the company's own website, with authentication built by Mersy and an SSO connection for some clients, and what the end user sees is an environment carrying the Mersy identity consuming Qlik Sense data underneath. Navigation was built along two simultaneous paths, with buttons at the entrance for those who want to get straight to the point and a side menu for those who need to go down to a specific level, and the arrangement accommodates the fact that Mersy keeps different types of application for different profiles, from lean versions aimed at action plans to applications with detailed information, so each person is taken to the content that matches what they do.

Two choices widened the platform's reach. The first was using the links space to connect the portal to Mersy's CRM and ticketing system, which makes the client move around a contract management platform rather than an isolated BI tool — a point Stéphane treats as part of the original requirement, since he was after a complete application architecture and not a standalone piece. The second was embedding videos inside the environment itself, working as usage guides and tutorials, which reduces the need for formal training precisely among the population of users Mersy has no way to train.

The interface is in French, and that localization matters more than it seems in a scenario where the end user is an employee of a large French company who needs to find their own number without an intermediary.