Vena Solutions - Sizzle With Very Little Steak
Updated October 13, 2020
Vena Solutions - Sizzle With Very Little Steak
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vena Solutions
Vena is being used as an enterprise budgeting and forecasting tool. It is primarily used during the budgeting season, but more recently, we are attempting to expand its use beyond the primarily yearly budgeting process. It addressed the largely spreadsheet based budgeting used prior to the introduction of Vena, which was difficult to manage.
- Reasonably good Excel interface
- Use of a dimensional style model was a good concept
- Cloud-based tenants in theory minimize the amount of administration
- The tool uses at least four different query and data manipulation languages, once you get your data to the tool. All of which are proprietary, limited flavors of other languages (such as SQL and MDX).
- The use of a MongoDB back end has resulted in the ongoing use of floats for numeric data storage. This works fine if you are budgeting at a high level. However, if you are leveraging their transaction-level features, you will see divergence due to the inherent issues of floating point being unable to precisely represent decimal values.
- There is very little community documentation around the tool, and the documentation provided by the vendor is sparse, poorly written, and often out of date or just plain wrong. This extends to their sample code as well
- There is currently no direct way to feed data from your source system databases. The primary method is dumping data to flat files and either executing the uploads manually through the web UI or wrapping a java-based CLI with Powershell or windows batch for local execution. There is also a preview of a logic app if you have Azure as part of your infrastructure
- Better than using spreadsheets
- There is a significant time investment required when stretching capabilities beyond basic budgeting.
- Back-end capabilities lacking what one would expect from a mature FP&A system, resulting in more maintenance and administration than one might expect from a SaaS solution.
I did not select Vena, and would not after popping the hood. It looks slick at a glance and has a good concept going, but once you begin to investigate further, there are a lot of foundational issues. Have your IT department perform a deep dive before making a decision.
I have worked with Cognos and Microsoft tools in the space, as well as a roll your own solution using Analysis Services and XLCubed. All had their own issues, but at the end of the day, the data was stored properly, the results could be trusted, and at least basic change management/source control could be applied.
I have worked with Cognos and Microsoft tools in the space, as well as a roll your own solution using Analysis Services and XLCubed. All had their own issues, but at the end of the day, the data was stored properly, the results could be trusted, and at least basic change management/source control could be applied.
Vena Feature Ratings
Vena Solutions Attributes
Do you think Vena delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Vena's feature set?
No
Did Vena live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Vena go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Vena again?
No
Using Vena Solutions
Vena Solutions Support
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Escalation required Need to explain problems multiple times |
Yes - it took a long time to get the issue resolved, but Vena did stick with it. I give them credit for continuing to pursue the issue, which was related to calc scripts and inconsistent results. While the bug was not declared a bug, Vena did eventually come up with a workaround solution. However, fearing it would not be completed in time, we built our own workaround and implemented that instead. A for effort, but it was not timely and took a number of meeting with Vena to get them to acknowledge the issue and pursue a viable solution.
The business (I'm IT) has had better luck. I'm copied on many of the communications, and Vena's support seems much more prepared to deal with user-facing issues such as template design, etc. than the back-end. They respond quickly to the initial inquiry and updates happen frequently, often intraday. So for the user-facing components, Vena support does a good job of finding solutions, and doing so quickly. The incident in particular that stands out was on fixing a template. Within less than 24 hours, they responded, had a couple of back-and-forths to get more information, then worked with a copy of the template to resolve the issue and provide it back.
Using Vena Solutions
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
None | Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Not well integrated Inconsistent Cumbersome Feel nervous using Lots to learn |
- Creating the base model framework
- Cloning/Copying a model
- Creating a basic reporting template
- Migrating code within or across tenants
- Understanding the differing limitations of calc scripts
- trying to version control the code
Yes, but I don't use it