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Impacts of the Vena Acquisition of Acterys

/in /by BPM Partners

Craig Schiff , President and CEO, BPM Partners

Overview

Vena has announced their intent to acquire Acterys, with the deal to close in a matter of weeks. At first glance there may appear to be significant overlap between the two product sets which both leverage Microsoft tools to deliver planning and broader EPM capabilities, albeit with different approaches. However, Vena has a clear vision of how to position the products going forward to deliver what they are calling Orchestrated Planning. More on this and Vena’s GTM strategy in the details below.

It is also important to note that Acterys is part of a pioneering community of vendors that take an approach to EPM that differs from the more established vendors. That’s why we named them our Best New Vendor of the Year in 2021. We can label this group ’the Power BI write-back vendors’. Several of them are also among the first in EPM to embrace Microsoft Fabric. In addition to Acterys this group includes Lumel, deFacto Global, Aimplan, and Power ON. By adding write-back to Power BI they expand it from a pure data consumption tool into a data creation tool as well.

The vision for many of these vendors is to use Power BI to create/collect planning data, sit on top of existing data warehouses, and bring planning to where the actuals data resides to perform analysis and generate performance reports. As a reminder, the more common approach for EPM vendors is to extract the actuals data from where it currently resides (ERP, general ledger, operational systems) and load it into the planning solution database. This acquisition is a vote of confidence and recognition that the Power BI write-back approach has merit and this may encourage more vendors (and prospects) to consider this approach as well. However, as you will see Vena’s vision for Power BI write-back is slightly different.

This Deal is a Net Positive for Vena, Acterys, and Current Customers

Vena is a successful and rapidly growing FP&A/EPM vendor with over 2,000 customers. Their target market is finance teams at Microsoft customers, and they fully leverage Microsoft Excel as a front-end to their central and secure database while also incorporating other Microsoft Office components in their solution. Acterys is a smaller Australia-based vendor with a global footprint and over 300 customers. In recent years they have focused their business on fully leveraging Power BI with write-back and Fabric to deliver analytics as well as operational planning with support for app development to address unique use cases. Their user base is a mix of Finance and IT.

While Vena has utilized embedded Power BI in their solution as a performance dashboard (Vena Insights), and started to work with Microsoft Fabric, Acterys accelerates realizing the value from these tools. The combination of Vena and Acterys will immediately make Vena a top choice for Microsoft customers looking for a vendor that fully leverages a broad range of Microsoft tools to address the performance management needs of Finance. It will also provide an opportunity for Finance to work with IT to address more company-specific operational use cases.

Operational planning capabilities and full integration of Power BI have been top priorities for EPM customers for several years now. In our 2025 BPM Pulse survey we found that 98% of companies are looking for an EPM solution to address one or more of their operational planning requirements. In terms of analytics 75% want EPM vendors to offer live integration with Power BI. Acterys’s embrace of Power BI along with operational planning capabilities (packaged and custom) combined with Vena’s Complete FP&A Platform that includes budgeting, planning, modeling, consolidation, reporting and analysis will be very compelling.

Another benefit of the combination of these two companies is the reuniting of Finance and IT when it comes to EPM. In the early days IT led the selection and rollout of EPM solutions. For the past 15-20 years IT has taken a back seat while Finance took the lead. Of course IT has been involved in project management, source system integration, security, and more recently evaluating AI capabilities. With Acterys’s app development capabilities IT can take a more active role working closely with Finance to develop new operational solutions.

Go to Market Plans: Orchestrated Planning

Both products and brands will coexist (at least for the next year), be integrated at the data level, and will be sold individually and bundled.  Of course existing customers will be offered the opportunity to add the product they don’t already own.  Orchestrated Planning will be the strategic theme. Vena’s vision of Orchestrated Planning – a company-wide uniting of people, processes, technology, agentic AI and data, sounds similar to what some vendors have labeled connected planning and will offer many of the same benefits. A differentiator though is leveraging the strengths of both products to tie decisions to actions by uniting planning and operational execution while leveraging agentic AI across the combined product set.

Of course there are some challenges to deal with. While Acterys offers custom app development many companies are looking for more out-of-the-box solutions, which is why many vendors that used to tout their flexible platforms have been delivering their own prepackaged applications. The good news is that both Vena and Acterys offer pre-built solutions: Vena with their pre-configured solutions for various industries such as banking and credit unions, hospitality, not-for-profits, and many others, and Acterys with their Rapid Results Packs for specific operational use cases such as procurement, logistics, as well as verticals such as government contractors, accounting firms, and more.

In Vena’s target market customers have a strong focus on data governance. Therefore, FP&A solutions writing directly back to source systems have traditionally been a concern. Many companies today already bring together data from multiple source systems to data warehouses such as Microsoft Fabric, and Acterys’s Power BI write-back to Fabric allows for real-time updates without compromising source system data governance requirements.

Lastly, Acterys licensed some of their technology to Microsoft several years ago for use with Microsoft Dynamics. The agreement included a narrowly defined non-compete which limits Vena’s ability to sell Acterys in situations where this non-compete applies. We believe this will impact only a small number of potential opportunities. Update February 8, 2026: These restrictions are no longer in place.

Vena has gone into this acquisition with its eyes open, looking to execute on its strategic vision of being the leading FP&A/EPM choice for Microsoft customers, evaluating multiple solutions to potentially acquire, and ultimately selecting Acterys. Although this is their first major product acquisition, we believe they made the right choice. Acterys is a proven and complementary solution to add to their existing Microsft-focused product offering. This should help Vena address additional needs of their current customers as well as reach a broader range of prospects looking for a Microsoft-centric EPM solution.

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This is an important topic that directly impacts you if you are planning to purchase a new performance management solution. To ensure you incorporate the latest developments into your project plans talk to us, or add us to your team. For our full report on Vena go here.

How a Complete CPM Solution Boosts Enterprise Resilience

/in /by BPM Partners

Sponsored by Anaplan

  • This white paper describes how an end-to-end CPM solution boosts enterprise resilience and fuels finance leadership, especially under volatile conditions.
  • Author: BPM Partners
  • Date: December 2025
  • Pages: 17
  • End-user organizations request your copy today by completing the White Papers Request form.

Executive Summary:

Enterprise finance has to contend with not only familiar business cycles and periods, but also disruptive circumstances that are marked by uncertainty. The latter conditions may be outside the experience of many managers and executives. Expected by organizational leadership to skillfully navigate these challenges, finance groups need assurance that their systems are up to the task.
To support analysis and decision-making in these complex situations, a complete CPM solution is more effective than a partial solution with limited and siloed functionality.

When a CPM solution covers the full spectrum of business performance management processes—from budgeting, planning and forecasting to consolidation, reporting, and analysis—within a unified platform, it can be described as an end-to-end or complete solution.

 

AI Evolution in Finance Drives a Productivity Revolution

/in /by BPM Partners

Sponsored by Prophix

  • This white paper looks at the evolution of AI in CPM and the benefits to Finance at each stage. Agentic AI has the potential to greatly enhance productivity and this report will examine this as well as the ROI implications.
  • Author: BPM Partners
  • Date: September 2025
  • Pages: 14
  • End-user organizations request your copy today by completing the White Papers Request form.
  • Consultants/vendors request your copy today from the Sponsor.

Watch: NYSE Wired – AI in EPM discussion with Craig Schiff

Executive Summary:

Enterprise finance has gone from a focus on machine learning (ML), to generative AI/language models, and now agentic AI.  Each of these three types represents a phase in the adoption and use of AI. Agentic AI enables key financial processes to become highly autonomous, while driving steady advances in efficiency and accuracy, enhancing Finance’s role as an enterprise value creator. Now is an ideal time period for finance teams to implement and test agentic AI.

 

How the Anaplan Acquisition of Fluence Will Change the CPM Market (For the Better)

/in /by BPM Partners

Craig Schiff , President and CEO, BPM Partners

Overview

Anaplan has announced their intent to acquire Fluence Technologies with the deal expected to close by the end of the month, if not sooner. This may look like yet another routine acquisition of a smaller vendor by a larger vendor in the enterprise software space. These types of deals occur on a regular basis and most people barely pay attention anymore. This one is different though, and its impact will ripple through the red-hot performance management market. For one thing, it validates the importance of true financial consolidation capabilities as a key component of performance management solutions and may cause some planning-only vendors to sit up and take notice. Let’s drill into the details.

Anaplan, Fluence, and Their Customers Will Benefit From This Deal

Both vendors and their customers benefit significantly from this combination. The two vendors’ offerings complement each other nicely, filling in key gaps, with minimal overlap. Anaplan pioneered ‘connected planning’ starting with a focus on providing a flexible platform for aligning strategic and operational planning, followed by the addition of robust financial planning capabilities. Today, Anaplan on its own is a planning leader, but in large enterprise deals financial consolidation has only grown in importance, and that is a key component they lack. Fluence, on the other hand, is focused on financial consolidation, redefining how a financial consolidation solution can handle complexity while also simplifying its administration and use by leveraging out-of-the-box functionality. Fluence’s challenge has been their lack of planning capabilities, requiring them to partner with other vendors for the significant number of companies looking to purchase both consolidation and planning. This two-vendor CPM solution approach didn’t always go over well. Anaplan, after the Fluence acquisition, will be able to provide its customers and prospects with the complete performance management planning, consolidation and disclosure management solution that most companies are looking for. This will enable the Finance team to utilize the Anaplan platform to plan their business in real-time while also being able to leverage a familiar UX to control and execute consolidation and disclosure management, streamlining the entire process and accelerating time to decision-making.

Anaplan Joins the Ranks of the Comprehensive CPM Solution Leaders for Large Organizations

The combination of these two leading CPM vendors will create a new dynamic in the top-tier of large enterprise focused performance management vendors. When this acquisition is complete Anaplan will join OneStream Software, Oracle, and Wolters Kluwer CCH Tagetik as one of the few leading vendors in the world offering a complete CPM suite of financial planning, operational planning, financial consolidation and close, reporting and analytics for large organizations. You might wonder why certain other familiar vendor names are missing from this list. The simple answer is that their current financial consolidation strategies disqualify them. As the Anaplan acquisition of Fluence highlights – financial consolidation, and the ‘one version of the truth’ that it enables, is critical to companies trying to measure their actual performance against plan.

Best-of-Breed Becomes a Real Choice

There has been renewed interest in best-of-breed solutions, particularly when it comes to planning and consolidation. Buyers see the value in purpose-built performance management solutions architected and optimized for particular use cases, they just don’t want to get them from two different vendors and have to worry about integration and support. Fluence is a best-of-breed consolidation solution, and as part of Anaplan it will remain as such. The current Anaplan Connected Planning platform and the Fluence product will work together as two best-of-breed solutions, integrated at the data level, sold and supported by a single vendor. If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s very similar to the approach Prophix has taken with its Prophix One platform which incorporates its Sigma Conso consolidation product acquisition.

Midmarket Consolidation Solutions

The acquisition of Fluence by Anaplan for consolidation capabilities validates the activity that has been going on for a while now in the midmarket where planning vendors have been expanding their own consolidation capabilities. Planful, during its Host Analytics days, was one of the first vendors in the midmarket to see the importance of consolidation and delivered those capabilities alongside planning and budgeting. More recently they have been enhancing their offerings in this area through strategic partnerships. Prophix, as previously mentioned, now delivers a complete CPM suite for the midmarket through their Prophix One offering. Vena, although a Fluence partner, has built out their own consolidation capabilities to the point where they would only need to bring in Fluence for very specific consolidation use cases. While it is unclear right now what will become of Fluence’s existing vendor partnerships, Vena continues to enhance its consolidation capabilities to address the most complex requirements, while also leveraging Vena Copilot to provide insights into the consolidated data, all included in Vena’s Complete Planning platform. Even Workday Adaptive Planning has recognized the importance of true financial consolidation alongside planning, as evidenced by their recent announcement of Workday Adaptive Planning and Consolidation which leverages the consolidation capabilities of Workday Financial Management through a unified data model.

The Future

Beyond the current crop of vendors, most new CPM vendors are still in their early stages and are focused primarily on financial planning and modeling for smaller organizations. There is one major exception however. JustPerform, who we named our Best New Vendor in 2022, provides a very capable financial consolidation and planning solution targeted at the upper midmarket/large company market segment. Despite their relatively small size they have been effectively competing with some of the larger vendors in this space.

While there will always be a place for budgeting and planning focused vendors, for large companies and growing midmarket organizations consolidation has shown itself to be an essential component. With the Anaplan acquisition of Fluence these companies now have one more compelling option to consider when looking for a modern and comprehensive CPM solution.

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This is an important topic that directly impacts you if you are planning to purchase a new performance management solution. To ensure you incorporate the latest developments into your project plans talk to us, or add us to your team.

Vena Announces Vena Copilot for FP&A

/in /by BPM Partners

Craig Schiff , President and CEO, BPM Partners

Overview

We are at an interesting juncture in terms of the adoption of AI in performance management systems. While vendors have been steadily rolling out AI capabilities for a number of years now (anomaly detection, predictive forecasting with machine learning, natural language processing, etc.) customers and prospects have basically reacted with a shrug, or worse. In our 2023 BPM Pulse survey 74% of respondents were skeptical of the value that AI could bring to CPM, and therefore hesitant to take advantage of it. It’s a year later and I hope the 2024 BPM Pulse will show significant movement towards greater acceptance.

All the noise around generative AI has certainly increased interest in AI, but that hasn’t yet translated to it becoming a buyer priority for CPM solutions. Users have basically said: ‘I don’t need AI to do my job for me, I just want it to make my job easier’. For vendors, the key will be to add AI in a seamless, non-threatening manner that clearly adds value, ideally in terms of productivity. For example, this could mean automating routine tasks, quickly locating requested data, reconciling data, customizing workflows and related tasks/menu choices based on roles and responsibilities. Much of this actually falls under the banner of ease of use, which is a priority for everyone and should aid in adoption. As a matter of fact, Microsoft’s recently announced Copilot for Finance takes this approach, focusing on streamlining the analysis and presentation of financial data. The true value of AI for Finance comes not so much from large-scale generic AI capabilities, but how well trained the model is specifically on financial data, and the company data model in particular. In other words, the more localized the focus the better, which brings us to Vena Copilot for FP&A.

Vena Copilot for FP&A

In business applications the most desirable AI capabilities are those designed to address selected use cases related to specific business roles and requirements and tied to the company’s data model. That is exactly the type of solution Vena set out to deliver with Vena Copilot for FP&A, a purpose-built solution to enhance FP&A productivity. Utilizing Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service large language models, Vena Copilot for FP&A is essentially an advanced conversational assistant for self-service insights. It enables users to gather data, generate reports, and analyze trends in a fraction of the time it would have taken them to accomplish those same tasks on their own.  The setup walks business users through the process of creating and training their unique AI model. They can choose from revenue or cost focused templates, or build their model from a clean slate. Next, they point it to their data model and map the appropriate elements of their Finance cube for model training. When they are satisfied with their model they can publish it, which makes it available for use across the organization. Once in use they can review user interactions and the scoring of the accuracy of the model and further train and fine-tune if necessary. That’s it. A custom model, tied to their unique needs, using their data. Vena Copilot for FP&A harnesses the power of generative AI specifically for FP&A users on the Vena Complete Planning platform. Currently in beta, the product is scheduled for general availability this May.

Vena’s Progress

Vena Copilot for FP&A complements other recently released or enhanced AI capabilities including Vena Insights, which provides AI-powered data visualizations with key influencers, decomposition trees, and anomaly detection. Vena advanced predictive forecasting unites Excel, the Vena CubeFLEX™ analytical data model, and Azure Machine Learning to deliver deep learning capabilities to improve forecast accuracy. There are several other product enhancements recently or soon-to-be released including new collaboration capabilities, additional Microsoft 365 integrations, and support for Vena data exports to feed processes in other systems. While R&D has been busy, Sales hasn’t been sitting still either. By our estimate Vena has added over 400 new customers in the past year, which is particularly impressive considering how competitive this space has become. We believe Vena is on the right track, fully leveraging the Microsoft technology stack to deliver innovative CPM solutions to midmarket Finance teams, and Vena’s sales momentum indicates we’re clearly not alone in our thinking.

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The performance management market is rapidly evolving. If you plan to purchase a new solution make sure you don’t base your decision on outdated (or biased) information. Talk to us first, or better yet: add us to your team.