Since our founding in 2007, Nova Partners has worked with just about every corporate performance management platform on the market. Before becoming ardent OneStream believers and Gold Partner implementers, we were in the broader business of finance transformation, willing to work with whatever tools were available to solve business process and financial dilemmas. For years, we found shortcomings in all of them — from platforms that couldn't integrate budget, forecast and actuals, to software that didn't allow businesses to view related data in a single place. We worked around whatever problems we encountered by collaborating with product and tech teams to modify and stretch each technology to its limits. But at the same time, we were always looking and hoping for something better — a platform that, out-of-the-box, could solve just about every business process problem, and crucially, store all enterprise data in one place. In 2017 we found it.
The first sign that OneStream was different was the flurry of LinkedIn activity we saw about what was then a mysterious new startup. CPM veterans we had come to respect after years of moving in similar circles were singing OneStream's praises and leaving their jobs to work for them. They claimed that OneStream was the one — the solution all of us in the industry had been waiting for. To judge whether the hype was legitimate, the Nova team went to OneStream's annual conference in 2018 and left so convinced that we changed our own business to become dedicated OneStream implementers.
What stood out to us most was its ability to house wide-ranging data in a single place. It was the controlled environment we were looking for that would enable businesses to do all their financial consolidation, planning, reporting and analysis in a single place. Without ever having to open a separate application, or to cut and paste from excel spreadsheets, businesses using OneStream could report financial information to all their stakeholders, from the SEC and debt holders to their shareholders and board of directors, while also scooping up answers to just about any query a CFO might have — from, "What are my top three performing products in the Northeast?" to, "What will my top performing products be in three years?"
Four years and 38 OneStream Projects later, we haven't looked back and have joined the chorus of CPM folks singing OneStream's praises, and proudly pointing out that we were among the first to recognize that OneStream is the one and Nova is the right partner for you.
