Clever Age named Ibexa Partner of the Month for April

The French full-service digital agency Clever Age was founded in 2001 in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble when the very business model of the internet seemed in doubt. Clever Age’s strategy of offering independent technological guidance for all aspects of digital transformation proved successful; today, it has an annual turnover of €50m, an employee headcount of around 500, and a network of 12 agencies – principally in France, but also in Singapore, Vietnam, and Montréal.

Clever Age’s involvement with Ibexa goes back a long way. Matthieu Sévère, Director of the Bordeaux office, recalls that he has been part of the Ibexa developer community for more than 15 years, “from the days that it was Open Source”. 

Since Clever Age became a formal Ibexa Partner in 2021, the collaboration has gone from strength to strength. “We are signing new deals, talking to promising prospects, and have a lot of projects in progress right now,” says Sévère. “The momentum of Ibexa is still there and that has been further strengthened from our side. We have been expanding our team of developers trained in Ibexa DXP.” 

In official recognition of the longevity and growth of the relationship, Clever Age won France Partner of the Year Award at the Ibexa Partner conference held in Mallorca earlier this year. The agency has also reaffirmed its status as Gold Partner.

 Clever Age is our Partner of the Month for April.

 “Ibexa DXP and Clever Age are successful and relevant in the market because we respond to its needs and also anticipate it,” says Olivier Martinerie, Head of Alliances of Clever Age. “For us, that means that we support B2B companies on their journey towards digital maturity. The B2B sector is still some five to 10 years behind the digital development of B2C. Ibexa seized this opportunity by pivoting to a B2B-only platform model a few years ago.”

 “B2C platforms are product-oriented, and their customer experience revolves around a catalogue. And to generalize a bit further, we see that B2B is best served by a best-of-breed modular approach that is part content management, part product data management, and with a native e-commerce element that gives you the extensibility you might need in future.”

 Matthieu Sévère, who is directly involved with the execution of Ibexa DXP projects, highlights another benefit of modularity. “One of the advantages of Ibexa,” says Sévère, “is that its DXP gives you the tools and freedom to meet the specific needs of your customers. In a B2B context there is a much greater demand for specificity than we typically encounter in B2C, and Ibexa DXP meets that demand. The Ibexa platform does not confine us. On the contrary, it allows us to develop services that meet the needs of our customers while taking advantage of the platform.”

“The flexibility and modularity have other advantages,” adds Martinerie. “B2B decision-makers really have reached the point where they know they have to strive for digital maturity. However, they don’t always know where to start, and may not have the budget for a huge upfront investment.

 “The modularity of Ibexa DXP allows you to start ‘small’ – perhaps with a single line of business or a single market. You can then expand that to other LOBs or other markets. You can personalize. One of our customers is actively considering adding Ibexa’s native PIM module to the platform. Another is looking for a headless architecture to service a mobile app. We have yet to implement Ibexa’s e-commerce functionality but for most of our customers it’s important to have that as an option.”

 “All this means is that Ibexa DXP is suitable for any type of sector, and that’s reflected in our customer base. We have manufacturing, education, real estate, property development, pharma, a holiday resort group – all supported by the Ibexa DXP platform as implemented by Clever Age.”

 One of the reference sites of the partnership is a major player in the French tourism industry with 60 “clubs” in France. Jérémy Poulain, Web Project Manager at Clever Age, gave an in-depth presentation on this project at a 2023 Ibexa Partner event in Paris. The major player in the French tourism industry had selected Ibexa DXP for the robustness of the platform, its capacity to allow for very specific customizations, its broad community – and its comparatively modest licensing cost.

 Clever Age and Ibexa DXP succeeded in reducing the daily ingestion of price and availability information from several hours to 15 minutes for 10m lines of data.

 After a complex build that took 11 months, the site went live in February 2023 with just a single hour of disruption.

 One of the most popular functionalities of Ibexa DXP is Site Factory, deployed extensively by a leading pharmaceutical group, and Kedge, the renowned French business school.

 “Site Factory enabled the international pharma business to open sites across its many international markets,” says Sévère. “Thanks to Ibexa, they have the capacity to deploy a new site for a new market at a very low cost, with an incredible speed-to-market.”

 A new site typically takes less than a fortnight to roll out. “It’s a one-day technical intervention,” Sévère explains. “The rest of the time is taken up with coordination, inputting content and so on.”

 The Grand École Kedge is based in Bordeaux and is a legacy customer of Ibexa. “Kedge uses Site Factory to deploy sites that target students, their parents, course applicants, campus life, or to sell training to professionals.”

 A recent and ongoing Ibexa project is for one of France’s leading private operators of higher education.  “The educational provider chose Ibexa especially for the flexibility of Page Builder and its ability to integrate the entire lead-taking chain into the DXP. The goal of the site for now is to capture candidates for its courses, so it’s a B2C orientation for now.”

 The French construction group Fayat is also a recent Clever Age/ Ibexa customer. With more than 23,000 employees across 234 subsidiaries, this is a corporate site on a grand scale. “The challenge here was to capture all of Fayat’s business divisions in a clear and intuitive way and simplify the workflows of product owners and content editors – two areas where Ibexa DXP excels.”

 Martinerie and Sévère are happy that their hard work and dedication were recognized at Ibexa’s recent Partner event and are upbeat about the future. “Ibexa’s versatility has been further extended through its link with other market-leading solutions under the QNTM umbrella,” says Martinerie. “We have always shared our vision of the market with Ibexa and the best way to address its needs – and that’s another positive for us: that we feel we can meaningfully contribute to the roadmap of the platform.”

 The experience of Clever Age informs the capabilities of Ibexa DXP, helping it serve Clever Age’s customer even better.

 It is the meaning and definition of partnership.