Vena has announced its acquisition of Acterys, a move that signals a continued shift in the FP&A landscape toward deeper integration with the Microsoft ecosystem.
For finance teams, this is more than just another software acquisition—it reflects a broader trend in how organizations are thinking about planning, reporting, and data.
Acterys is best known for its ability to extend Power BI beyond traditional reporting. Its technology enables finance teams to input data, apply business logic, and perform planning activities directly within Power BI—effectively turning it into a more complete FP&A environment.
This addresses a common challenge many organizations face today. While Power BI is widely adopted for dashboards and analytics, planning often remains fragmented across spreadsheets or separate platforms. The result is disconnected workflows, duplicated data, and limited visibility across the business.
By bringing Acterys into its platform, Vena is taking a step toward closing that gap.
Vena has long positioned itself as a planning solution built around Microsoft technologies, particularly Excel. With this acquisition, that strategy expands further into Power BI and modern data platforms.
The combination has the potential to unify planning, reporting, and data management across tools that finance and business teams already use every day. For organizations invested in Microsoft, this could simplify architecture and improve collaboration between finance and data teams.
One of the more interesting trends we’ve seen at RVNA Tech—through our client work, conversations with prospects, and the events we host regularly—is how the relationship between FP&A platforms and BI tools has evolved.
Not too long ago, most financial planning (CPM) platforms—including Vena and others—were trying to compete directly with BI tools by building their own native dashboards and analytics layers.
Today, that approach is shifting.
With the rapid adoption of Power BI across the enterprise, many organizations have already standardized on it as their primary reporting and analytics tool. As a result, CPM platforms are increasingly leaning into integration rather than competition—recognizing that users will continue to rely on Power BI instead of replacing it with proprietary dashboards.
Vena has been ahead of this trend for some time by embedding Power BI into its platform.
With the Acterys acquisition, they are taking it a step further.
Beyond just visualization, the addition of Acterys introduces the ability to input data, apply planning logic, and write data back—all directly within Power BI. In effect, Power BI becomes not just a reporting layer, but another interface for planning, alongside Excel, which Vena already uses extensively for data input.
This is a meaningful shift in how organizations can think about their finance and data architecture.
This development reinforces a key shift in the market: FP&A is no longer just about planning in isolation. It is increasingly connected to enterprise data, real-time reporting, and advanced analytics.
Finance teams are looking for ways to:
The Vena and Acterys combination speaks directly to these priorities.
At RVNA Tech, we continue to see growing demand from CFO organizations to better connect their planning processes with their data and reporting environments.
Another important layer to this is Vena’s clear commitment to the Microsoft ecosystem for the CFO office.
Microsoft has long been a leader in supporting business users—dominating the productivity layer with Office, and more recently establishing a strong foundation for data with Azure and Microsoft Fabric. Now, with Power BI and AI capabilities like Copilot, the platform is moving into a new phase—where reporting, data, and intelligence are becoming more tightly integrated.
Vena is aligning directly with this momentum.
It effectively adds the missing CPM layer on top of the Microsoft stack—bringing structured planning, forecasting, and financial processes into an ecosystem that many organizations already rely on across their business.
This acquisition strengthens that position even further. By extending planning capabilities directly into Power BI, Vena is helping bring together data, reporting, and planning into a more unified experience for finance teams.
You can read the full announcement from Vena here:
https://www.venasolutions.com/newsroom/vena-to-acquire-acterys
If you're exploring FP&A platforms or looking to get more out of Power BI, feel free to get in touch with our team.
