Vena

Vena Solutions is a financial planning and analysis cloud platform provider that was founded in 2011. It is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with additional offices in the United States and United Kingdom. Currently, the company has more than 750 employees in total. Vena Solutions 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 over 1,700 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 Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, 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 Power BI and Microsoft’s 
AI and ML technology for reporting, analysis and advanced analytics (called Vena Insights). The product is sold and implemented by Vena itself and through a global partner network of approximately 170 resellers and solution implementers. In the recent past in particular, Vena has placed a strong emphasis 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 as the underlying technology). For data integration, Vena offers its own data transformation layer/ETL, open APIs and is supported by process automation platforms such as Microsoft Power Automate. 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, demand forecasting, etc.) in one unified platform. Moreover, Vena and its partners offer more than 20 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 for creating 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 identified using AI and ML capabilities. With Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio integrated with Vena CubeFLEXTM, customers can create advanced predictive ML forecast models, gain strategic insights and detect unusual patterns in data.

Fully integrated with the platform’s core capabilities, Vena offers financial consolidation, financial close management and account reconciliation functionality. Statutory as well as management consolidation processes are supported, including accounting for partial ownership, intercompany eliminations, multiple currencies and multiple ERPs/general ledgers. Vena complements its own capabilities with a solution for more complex consolidations developed by its partner Fluence.

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