By Hunter Madeley, CEO, Vena
At Vena, every decision we make is guided by a simple belief: organizations succeed when they leverage the strength of their data and their people to align plans and act on them, on time, using the systems they trust.
That belief is why we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire Acterys, pending regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. This move accelerates a direction we’ve long believed enterprise performance management must take, as organizations push beyond simple integrated planning towards true alignment and reliable execution in increasingly complex environments.
Integrated Planning Was the First Step. Aligned Execution Is the Next.
Over the past decade, enterprises have made meaningful progress moving from siloed functional budgeting into Integrated Business Planning and xP&A models. These approaches helped organizations connect finance, operations, and strategy through integrated plans.
That progress matters. It laid the foundation.
But today, integration is no longer the limiting factor.
Data is beginning to overwhelm. Agentic promise seems forever just over the horizon. The environments in which we operate are in perpetual flux, and decisions making teams are questioning their ability to adapt and execute. Even when plans are effectively integrated, organizations struggle to map alignment to on-time execution against the backdrop of highly dynamic markets. Confidence begins to erode between planning and execution.
This confidence gap is the signal that current planning models have reached their limits.
Orchestrated Planning: The Next Maturity Stage
We believe Orchestrated Planning represents the next maturity stage of Integrated Business Planning and xP&A.
These frameworks helped organizations align plans across finance, operations, and strategy. But as enterprises grow more complex, the constraint is no longer alignment alone, it is decision latency: the gap between knowing what to do and being able to execute that decision on time across the organization.
Orchestrated Planning evolves integrated models into an execution-ready operating system designed to reduce that latency.
It harmonizes people, systems, and intelligent agents within a governed, secure environment so that aligned decisions translate into coordinated action, without rebuilds, manual handoffs, or erosion of confidence between planning and execution.
Rather than simply producing better plans, Orchestrated Planning ensures decisions move through the enterprise with clarity, speed, and accountability.
As data volumes expand, markets shift rapidly and more work is shared between humans and intelligent systems, orchestration becomes essential to maintaining trust, governance, and performance at scale.
This progression reflects where enterprise performance management is headed: from integrated planning toward orchestrated execution.
Why Vena and Acterys Together
Vena provides the finance-led foundation where collaboration begins, models are shaped and refreshed, changes are governed auditable, and enterprise performance is managed with confidence. Acterys extends this foundation into functional environments through Power BI, enabling write-back, application-driven workflows, and execution within the systems business teams already use.
Together, Vena and Acterys will form a single, continuous operating model for planning and execution.
Finance maintains stewardship. IT ensures scale, security, and governance. Business teams execute decisions where work actually happens.
The result is not a collection of disparate tools and processes, but a unified system that replaces fragmented IBP and xP&A deployments with a more complete execution model. Decisions move from strategy to operations without needing to be rebuilt, reinterpreted, or delayed.
This is what finance-led, IT-amplified, business-owned orchestration looks like in practice.
Built on Microsoft, Designed To Scale
This evolution is inseparable from the Microsoft ecosystem.
Vena and Acterys share a Microsoft-native philosophy that brings together Excel as the planning and modeling interface, Power BI as the operational execution surface, Microsoft Fabric as the governed data foundation, and Azure-based AI to support intelligent, transparent agentic execution.
AI, in this context, is not about autonomous control. It’s about supporting decision flows, reducing friction, and enabling agents to operate within a clear governed mandate.
By orchestrating both planning and execution within a Microsoft-native operating model, organizations no longer need overlapping tools to achieve IBP, xP&A, and execution. The system matures with them.
Looking Ahead
The feedback we’ve received from customers, partners, and analysts reinforces this direction.
Organizations are not asking for more integrated planning tools. They are asking for fewer handoffs, less latency, and greater collaboration and confidence that decisions will be executed when it matters most.
Orchestrated Planning answers that call by advancing IBP and xP&A into an execution-ready operating model built for the modern enterprise. Stay tuned as we look to roll out our Orchestrated Planning Maturity model in the coming weeks. Exciting times ahead.
Plan Better. Achieve More.