Merilytics: Providing Advanced Analytical Solutions To Help Businesses Sustain

Artificial intelligence, as an art, invites innovation. The primary and probably the sole objective to embrace innovation is to ease out the difficulties faced by companies that thrive on technology. The technological advancements are not new in the market but executing them in an organized and disciplined manner is a challenging task for most companies. For this reason alone, organizations and companies tend to seek help from Merilytics that dedicates itself to innovation and ethical client servicing, providing insights on their progress in the path of data analytics and big data. Merylitics stresses generating optimal solutions for their clients and believes in evolution with every step by offering advanced and intelligent analytical solutions to clients globally.

 In an exclusive interview with Analytics Insight,  Merilytics Founder and CEO, Paavan Choudary shares the company's unique moves and strategies it employs to understand the clients better and satisfy them with the efficient services they provide. Here are the questions we asked. 

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers. 

Merilytics offers advanced and intelligent analytical solutions to clients globally. Our solutions primarily focus on using decision sciences and analytics-based approaches to generate superior returns for clients. 

We solve complex analytical problems remotely (offshore model) directly for clients (USA, Europe, Middle East, Australia, SEA), indicating an element of trust and capability that is integral to our delivery model. 

We have a simple and unique delivery model where all skills and capabilities (Analytics, Technology, Data Science) required to solve an analytical problem are bundled into a single engagement model.

Our Services: 

a. Advanced Analytics: We provide tailored analytical solutions across the decision-making value chain using both traditional analytics approaches and advanced analytics techniques, as relevant to the business problem. Our data-driven insights help our clients transform the way they make decisions. 

b. Data Management: We leverage our integrated expertise in Analytics and Technology to create customized data management solutions that include, end-to-end data infrastructure set-up, and the associated reporting infrastructure, that is self-serve for decision-makers and seamlessly blends into the operational processes.

c. Analytics Application Development: Our technological applications are based on our proprietary development platforms and provide bespoke, user-friendly, and sustainable analytics solutions that fill in the gap where off-the-shelf tools and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules cannot be leveraged. They are as follows: 

• Based on a deep understanding of specific business process workflows and end-user perspective 

• Fill critical business gaps where off-the-shelf tools and ERP modules cannot be leveraged. 

• Customized to client technology stack to ensure seamless integration, e.g., proficient in a diverse set of stacks.

2. With what mission and objectives were the company set up? 

Meryltics aims to consistently deliver high-quality and advanced analytical solutions that lead to superior returns to clients. While providing solutions to fill critical business gaps in order for them to sustain is crucial for the company, it also aspires to be the most valued and trusted analytics partner for clients globally.

3. In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company? 

The Company has evolved to meet the dynamic nature of the industry and the technology ecosystem to enable robust data analytics. Data is growing exponentially, technology stack lifecycles have reduced drastically, technology infrastructural costs have reduced significantly, and clients have a higher appetite for self-serve analytics. These trends were well anticipated by us and given most of our clients sit on the Boards of the companies, we stayed one step ahead and partnered with them and their Management teams to enable them to succeed. 

We began with pure analytics solutions, then added on data management (backward integration) and analytics apps solutions (forward integration). As a result, we have built out the technology and data science capabilities in addition to the core analytics. We started with U.S. clients, then expanded to clients in SEA, Australia, and Europe. 

We are completely self-funded and bootstrapped and leverage our internal reserves for any expansion and capital expenditure. This allows us to have operational freedom and flexibility to deliver our unique business model. This gave us the edge, especially during the Covid pandemic, as we were able to make the right decisions for our people – honoring all campus offers made to new joiners and meeting all compensation commitments to employees. 

We have also evolved when it comes to the industries we work across and hold expertise in. Initially, we focused primarily on consumer-focused industries and later expanded to Technology/Software, Healthcare, Logistics & Transportation, Real Estate, etc. 

More recently, we have re-structured ourselves internally and set up a PMO (Project Management Office) called "MERIT", to centrally monitor the overall delivery processes, through innovative project management practices, that will allow for faster scaling up of our operations. 

As we grew, our Human Resources functions, which include – Employee Relations (ER), Talent Acquisition (TA), and Learning & Development (L&D) –contributed heavily to creating an enriching atmosphere for our employees. This includes drafting a wide range of employee-friendly policies and conducting a variety of employee engagement activities (Company get-togethers, town halls, open houses & cultural events, strategic internal conferences and meetings, CSR drives to contribute to society, etc.) which help in building a culture of open collaboration, thus promoting high growth and learning. 

4. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company. 

Our client base is completely referral based and their expectation of the quality of work is very high, given they sit on the boards of their respective organizations, which are usually renowned and established companies from the USA, Europe, Australia, Middle East, and SEA. Our client relationship renewal rate is also extremely high, which is not common for our industry. 

These two aspects are our biggest awards and irrefutable proof of our capabilities and value-add. Our clients regularly provide us unsolicited, very positive, warm and encouraging feedback as we can partner closely with them to deliver results in the form of very tangible business value. Here are some of them: 

"We appreciate our relationship with Merilytics. We could not have progressed as far as we have without you. " – A renowned American Healthcare company 

"We appreciate the proactive partnership. Merilytics has been a great partner and we genuinely view the team as an extension of our organization." – A top-performing American staffing solutions company 

"Having Merilytics as a partner has been a huge assistance. Thank you and looking forward to continuing the partnership." – A very popular Canadian cosmetics manufacturer. 

5. Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry. 

Paavan Choudary is the founder and CEO of Merilytics. An alumnus of well-renowned institutions such as Mayo College, Ajmer, B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay, and MBA from Columbia University, New York, his success story revolves around several crucial years working with the most prominent consulting and financial enterprises in the U.S., such as McKinsey and Capital One. Under his leadership, Merilytics is serving well-renowned global Private Equity, FMCG, Healthcare, Health & Wellness etc. clients by integrating analytics into their operations, optimizing their services for customers. Merilytics' phenomenal growth is due to Paavan's drive and passion for building a world-class analytics enterprise, with the vision to become a go-to partner in Data Analytics for companies across the world.

6. What role has analytics played in the innovation of new technologies? 

a. Analytics has been integrated into every technology, so that users of the technology, be it a website, an application, or a tool, not only get to utilize the solution, but also get the benefit of leveraging data to optimize the usage or to enhance the experience. 

b. The feedback loop of technologies is now real-time, which enables rapid innovation cycles for any technology. 

c. Also, now there are more forward-looking and predictive aspects of technologies that are enabled through advanced data analytics, and this leads to innovative possibilities to look into the future for any business. 

d. Also, the entire IoT-based solutions, including its industrial, consumer, and healthcare application, are based on the premise of collecting vast amounts of data of every touchpoint and interaction, and automate solutions accordingly. 

e. Data analytics also contributes immensely to innovation in product development. With advanced analytics techniques and frameworks, a lot of trial and error can be culled out as analytics can help in bridging the gap between ideas and business decisions in real-time through actionable insights backed by data and research. Apart from product development, it also has a great impact on product improvement by leveraging the user/customer data to understand the product adoption and usage and accordingly, draw out the user experience insights and formulate a strategy to bring about changes to the product feature catalog that better complements the targeted audience's needs. 

7. Can you throw light on the latest employment trends in the big data and analytics industry? 

a) At a broad level, the key trend is that people who are multi-skilled, or those who bring in the relevant business experience along with the technical knowledge and experience of data analytics, are sought after. The new graduates or those who are in the early part of their career, are trying to imbibe this as they prepare to get hired or succeed further in the analytics industry. 

b) Because of COVID, interview processes had to be made more innovative to account for remote interactions and potentially even remote onboarding. Companies have a greater pool to choose from as it is easy to interview from one's homes, and more people are looking out for new jobs as switching cost is very low, given the remote working model. However, this also negatively impacts companies through higher attrition for the same reasons. 

c) Technology stacks have become more diverse despite the concentration on 2-3 large players, and therefore able to be flexible in working with various tools and technologies is highly critical.