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451 Research: Vena's Excel Approach Stands Out in Corporate Performance Management

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Exponential growth and powerful solutions add to Vena's important competitive differentiators.

A recent report on Vena Solutions by tech analyst firm 451 Research highlights how embracing Excel, an exponential growth rate and powerful solutions help Vena stand out from the competition in the enterprise or corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) sector.

Embrace, Don't Replace Excel

Because of Excel's overwhelming popularity in the finance world, "Vena's ability to provide native Excel functionality is a differentiator and important [for people] who want to keep using the skills and familiarity they have built up using Excel," writes Krishna Roy, Senior Analyst, Data Platforms and Analytics with 451 and author of the report.

"Vena's multi-tenant cloud service was designed from the outset to natively work with Excel, providing a secure and controlled environment for Excel-based tasks," said Roy. "Which is the central growth driver behind the company's business and the main reason it wins deals."

And according to Roy, Vena will continue to win more deals because of its embrace Excel approach; the massive global base of the Excel faithful represents a "large market opportunity," in her words.

Growing at a (Very) Healthy Clip

Vena prides itself on being the fastest growing cloud-based corporate CPM software company.  With triple digit growth in sales, customers and staff over the past 3 years (and running), this is a sentiment echoed by several analysts covering the sector, and a point not lost on Roy.

"[Vena's] business seems to be growing at a healthy clip, which validates its product strategy," she said.

The report goes further to note how some of the product development currently underway - from data discovery and advanced analytics capabilities to mobile reporting and full Microsoft Office integration - will keep Vena's growth up.

Combining Powerful Functionality with Ease of Use

The 451 report also touches on how Vena combines companies' existing, familiar spreadsheets with powerful, enterprise-grade functionality such as "wrapping a browser, workflow, collaboration and other capabilities around Excel, in order to take full advantage of the Excel model."

In addition, Roy talks about Vena as a way to get rid of the human error so prevalent in finance departments through the automation it brings to (previously standalone) Excel spreadsheets. By consolidating customers' most important financial and performance data into a secure cloud repository, "[Vena] eliminates the need to manually link spreadsheets or run macros."

"Vena has a visual workflow environment, which has a Microsoft Visio look and feel. Underpinned by a workflow engine, it is designed to enable management to assign tasks and deadlines to particular users and interactively monitor their status," said Roy. "An audit trail record capability means that all user activity can be tracked, and management can go back and view previous versions to compare differences over time."

In short, Vena gives finance departments the best of both, previously competing worlds: staying within Excel, the software they know so well, while getting all the control, security, and scalability of traditional (typically complex and expensive) enterprise solutions.

It's all about turning what's usually a difficult and expensive problem into an easy-to-use, centralized, and automated process. As the report points out, Vena stands out because it uses the most-beloved and popular software in the finance world.

For more on 451 Research or to read the full report, please visit www.451research.com.

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