Vena Platform

Founded in 2011, Vena Solutions is a financial planning and analysis cloud platform provider with more than 700 employees globally. The vendor is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with operating entities in the United States, the United Kingdom and India. Vena is backed by several investors to accelerate growth and continue to provide a market-leading customer experience. According to the vendor, Vena is currently used by more than 1,900 customers worldwide.

Vena is a complete planning platform and helps organizations of all sizes and industries with integrated solutions for planning, budgeting and forecasting, reporting, analytics, financial consolidation and close, and account reconciliation. The primary target group for the product is the office of finance as well as all operational departments. As a cloud-native platform leveraging Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, Vena can be accessed via web browsers and offers native integration with Microsoft Office 365. Vena strategically integrates with Microsoft’s technology stack – leveraging Excel as its primary user interface for entering data, integrating with Microsoft 365 (e.g., PowerPoint, Teams), and embedding and productizing Power BI and Microsoft’s 
AI and ML technology for FP&A reporting, analysis and advanced analytics (called Vena Insights). The product is sold and implemented by Vena itself but also through a global partner network of approximately 180 resellers and solution implementers. In addition, and as a strategic future channel for global sales, Vena is part of Microsoft’s co-selling program, leveraging Microsoft’s sales teams and partners for joint selling opportunities through the Azure Marketplace. Customers can purchase Vena software licenses through the Azure Marketplace using their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), providing potential cost benefits. In the recent past, Vena has placed a strong focus on enhancing its global partner ecosystem, developing new partnerships and partnering on preconfigured solutions.

Vena’s solution is technically based on its own Vena CubeFLEXTM technology – an in-memory, multidimensional database that is the core of the platform – as well as a relational/OLTP database to handle large scale transaction data volumes (leveraging Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure SQL Server and Mongo as the underlying technology). For data integration, Vena offers its own data transformation layer/ETL and open APIs. In addition, Microsoft Fabric Data Factory and Microsoft Power Automate can be used to import data into Vena. Predefined connectors are available to integrate data from several on-premises and cloud-based data sources.

The platform provides comprehensive functionality for all kinds of planning, budgeting and forecasting processes and can be flexibly modeled to address business-model-specific use cases and requirements. The product supports both financial planning and operational planning (including sales, marketing, IT, HR (workforce), supply chain and demand forecasting) in one unified platform. Moreover, Vena and its partners offer preconfigured solutions for various use cases and industries. These solutions include templates, data models, connectors and business logic and can be adapted to a customer’s specific needs. Based on the planning model, Vena leverages an Excel grid interface to create planning forms as well as plan data entry. To control planning processes, Vena offers a web-based, visual workflow designer and blueprint to help in the development of individual workflows (e.g., task management and due dates, status monitoring, approval, email notifications, etc.). Once plan data is entered, anomalies and potential data entry errors can be recognized using AI and ML capabilities. Customers can create advanced predictive ML forecast models, gain strategic insights and detect unusual patterns in data. In addition, Vena Copilot’s generative AI capabilities, developed with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Services, can help business users create forecasts, conduct what-if simulations, identify seasonal patterns, generate reports, analyze trends and answer business questions in natural language.

Fully integrated with the platform’s core capabilities, Vena offers financial consolidation, financial close management, account reconciliation, lease accounting, tax and ESG/sustainability accounting functionality. Statutory as well as management consolidation processes are supported, including accounting for partial ownership, intercompany eliminations, multiple currencies and multiple ERPs/general ledgers.

For reporting and self-service analytics, Vena leverages an Excel grid interface connected to Vena CubeFLEXTM to explore data and create reports. Furthermore, for advanced dashboards with interactive data visualizations, mobile support, natural language capabilities and generative insights, Vena embeds Microsoft Power BI (Vena Insights).