Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. My name is Anne Samuel, and I cover healthcare technology and distribution here at JP Morgan. We're thrilled to have Veeva with us presenting today. With us are CEO Peter Gassner and CFO Brent Bowman. They're gonna do a brief presentation, and then my associate, Kyle, is gonna help out with the Q&A. So with that, let me turn it over to Peter.
All right. Hello, folks. Can you hear me okay? All right. You know, third day of JPM, you've got some rain, and you got some wind. You've had a lot of meetings. Some of you may be introverts, so your, your brains might be mush, like mine right now. So you never know what you're gonna get from me in this situation, but I'll try to, you know, explain a little bit about Veeva, and maybe you also might pick up something about the industry as well, because our customers are pharma and biotech customers, and, and I talk to, and we talk to a lot of them, so you might be able to pick up some things about the industry from, from observing through Veeva's lens. So that's what I'm gonna plan to do, and let's see if this works. It does. Safe harbor.
We're gonna do some forward-looking statements here, and you can, you can read about those on our website. This is how we operate the company, through vision and values. A very operative slide for Veeva. I present this thing probably 12 times a quarter, beginning and end of every board meeting, significant management team meeting, et cetera. It's, it's really what we're doing, very operative. So our vision is building the industry cloud for life sciences, so that means software, data, and high-quality, high-value professional services to help the life sciences industry get more efficient and effective. We wanna be essential to and appreciated by every company in life sciences. So that's the vision. It's hard to get there, maybe we never will, but that's what we're trying to do. The values are how we make decisions, big and small, along the way.
The first, and they're in stack-ranked order, first is do the right thing. That's about honesty, integrity. You know, about knowing what the right thing is to do and actively doing it. Customer Success is a little bit more in-depth. That has three parts. Veeva has to be a positive for the people inside of life sciences. So the people that work in pharma and biotech, that go to this conference, Veeva has to be a positive because their interactions with our products and people have to be good. It also has to be a positive for the second customer, which is the companies. So if our project is running at a small biotech or a large pharma, we have to deliver positive ROI and help that company. And the third is for the industry overall.
We have to be a positive force for the industry, help it be more efficient and effective. You know, we have to do our own little part to make JPM more vibrant because the industry is more vibrant. That's what we're aspiring to do, customer success. Employee Success, pretty straightforward. Has to be a place for our team, a place where they can do their best work. And speed reminds us to get things done quickly and correctly the first time, to retain that startup speed even as we grow. And then, we're a public benefit corporation, so we're a for-profit company, but we're not all about the money. It's not all about shareholders. We converted to a public benefit corporation about three years ago so that we can be a good steward to this industry, and, I'm really proud of that, and we'll talk about what that means.
So when you're a public benefit corporation, a Delaware public benefit corporation, your legal duty at the board of directors level, which I'm a member of the board, as well as being the CEO, is to balance the interests of all concerned. So for us, that's customers, employees, shareholders, society in general. That's what our legal duty is. And when you think about what we're doing, which is trying to become essential to the people that are producing the world's medicine, you know, that's a responsibility. We have to balance those interests. Now, that helps us produce good returns because it helps us attract the right type of talent that's aligned to what we're trying to do, and you better believe that helps us deepen our customer relationships because the customers know they have a seat at the table. So we converted about three years ago.
First company to convert to a public benefit corporation, and I couldn't be more happy with the results and how it sets everybody at Veeva at ease. "Okay, this is what, this is the way it should be, and this is what we're doing." Just a few facts about Veeva. So we're an innovator in industry cloud, industry-specific cloud software. I came from mainframe software and then early days Salesforce.com, and then started this idea about, okay, industry-specific cloud software, and that was kind of a pretty novel thing in 2007. So we've, you know, we've grown since then, and we have over 7,000 employees, 1,400 customers, approaching $2.5 billion run rate in revenue. We're profitable, and we're growing. So we run a good business. That's the basics about Veeva.
What you'll hear today is how we have a large market opportunity, and a little bit how and why we focus on product excellence and how important that is. You'll hear about our operating model and how that translates into a long runway of growth ahead. So you should get a real straightforward picture of Veeva. This slide represents our product strategy, and that's something that has really come into focus, especially in the last year for Veeva. I feel, you know, very comfortable about our product strategy. This is a product strategy that will withstand the test of time, and we can grow into this product strategy over a long time. So our product strategy: software, data, and services for life sciences with three main categories. One is development cloud, that's software to aid in drug development, from clinical trials through to quality and manufacturing.
Commercial Cloud, that's software to aid on the commercial side, so applications for sales, medical, and marketing. And Data Cloud , that's industry-specific data sets made by Veeva that span from commercial to clinical in a few different categories and are tightly integrated with our software. Now, all those three things that I talked about, so three big buckets. Within the buckets, there's suites, within the suites, there's applications. You'll see there's, you know, over 50 applications. In some sense some are the market leaders, some are early, some we've just announced, but all these pieces are pretty modular, so you can start where you need to, and they're not applicable to all companies. Yes, all 50 are applicable to the top 20 companies, but to a small biotech, they may not need all of our products.
So pretty modular, and to serve the 200-person biotech or the 50,000-person large pharma. It's supported by business consulting, and that is the process consulting that sometimes goes along with our software. So where we can help companies with their operating models, what roles and responsibilities are best, what metrics to look at, how do you do the change management in and around our products? So this is what the industry cloud for life sciences is, and I'll talk about each of these three product areas. I'm not gonna go through each one of these products. This is the Development Cloud, and you can see organized by area, from clinical operations area over to quality and manufacturing, the drug safety. Within each area, there are multiple applications. Within an area, they are tightly integrated together, but they can also integrate across areas.
Each of these applications has to be the best in class. Before Veeva, there would be a specialist company in every one of these areas, but that's hard. They don't have any leverage of relationships. They don't have any incentive to make the integrations work well. It's hard for them to recruit the top-class product people. It's as if back when I started, there wasn't SAP, there was just somebody making an accounts payable one and an accounts receivable and a project costing. That's hard, right? So that's when what we started on Development Cloud in about 2010, I guess, 2011, that was the landscape. Now, we have good products in all these areas, but that's the struggle at Veeva. Each product has to be great.
So if I just call out a couple, in the clinical data there, there's one called ePRO, Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes. That's an application that's actually used by patients to report on how they're feeling in a standardized way. The patient uses it, so that's very specific, and it's gotta work. If you look over on the right side, there's a QMS. That's a very established application for us. That's a quality management system used by the internal pharma company to manage their quality processes across their whole manufacturing, used on the shop floor. So very, very different applications and everything in between, right? Safety and regulatory. They all have to be great, and they all have to work together. What you'll see later is: how do we do that? We have an operating model for this.
We have roles and responsibilities to be a great multi-product, and controls to be a great multi-product company. So sometimes people would just think, "Oh," I do get people ask me like, "Gosh, how, how come Veeva's keep on getting lucky in all these areas?" You know, that's statistically impossible. We, we have an operating model. Just like a large pharma company has an operating model to have success across multiple products, they don't just keep getting lucky, we have an operating model. Now, for Development Cloud, that's all supported by our Veeva Vault Platform. That's our technology platform that we use to develop these applications, make it very efficient for us and for our customers to operate these applications.
So that's where the common layer of all these things like workflow, security, reporting, configuration, user management, APIs, all that stuff is in the Vault Platform so that we don't have to replicate it across each application, which if you're a standalone company, you would. You'd have to replicate it, and you'd drown yourself if you only have one of these applications. But also, it's much more efficient for our customers 'cause they can develop skills around this platform, and it's transferable across applications. So that's Development Cloud. Commercial Cloud, that's for the sales, medical, and marketing areas of pharmaceutical companies. So if you think of a biotech or pharmaceutical, they've got some important things that's on the mind of the CEO. They got their clinical trials, and they got their product launches. They got to get products approved.
They got to make money from the products and treat the patients before the product goes off patent. Those are these two big areas. This is the commercial area. Commercial cloud is software to help them do that. Again, it's organized by area with multiple applications. Now, what's different here is this is where Veeva started in 2007 with our CRM product there, the one on the, on the top left, and that was built on the Salesforce.com platform. Because obviously, in 2007, we didn't have our Veeva Vault Platform. That takes a long time, many years to do that. So we built CRM on the Salesforce platform, and about a year ago, we announced we were gonna move that to our Vault Platform, our own platform, which just makes sense.
That's the, the newer platform, and that's how we, how we have all of our other applications there. So that's a process that will play itself out over the, over the next five years, and we have our first customers live. So that's our CRM application, but there are many applications here, too. So I'll call out Crossix, an area, an area that we have, very interesting. It's for healthcare marketing specific to the United States, so we can measure when there's a TV ad, for example, does that TV ad lead to what type of patients seeing what type of specialists and getting on what type of therapy? So that's very, very, very specialized. It's a way to understand, if I'm spending $100 million on digital marketing, is it being effective or not, and monitoring and change that.
You can imagine how different that piece of software is from our CRM system. Very, very different, but we're the leaders in both of those areas. We're the leader in measurement, media measurement with Crossix. We're certainly the leader in CRM with Veeva. And then we have an example of some things that are brand new. So our Patient CRM, where companies are wanting to track identified patients that opt in for a complicated medicine. That's a product we've just announced. We haven't even started the development of it yet. So what you'll see here from Veeva is we're very transparent. When we decide to do something, we wanna tell people about it. So that's the way we develop partnership with our customers. We're not trying to hide things or worry about competitive advantage.
Once we decide to do things, we tell people about it, try to organize the industry, and try to execute on it, because that's really where the rubber meets the road, is execution. Again, this is all on the Vault Platform. That's the way forward. CRM, we're moving from the Salesforce platform to the Veeva Platform, Veeva Vault Platform. So that's Commercial Cloud, two sets of software. The next one is Development Cloud, the third one, and that's different. This is not about software products. These are about industry-specific data sets created and curated by Veeva. So these are data products that you would subscribe to, not software products. And this takes a little bit. This is a newer area for us. It takes a little bit more time to understand, I guess, but I'll just talk about the areas.
You know, from the left to the right, we have Open Data, which is our Reference Data . So that's the core Reference Data , list of doctors, hospitals, how they relate to each other, what are the specialties, et cetera, in more than 100 countries across the globe. That's used for compliance in sales and marketing. We're gonna extend that to the clinical area. That's to be used in operating your clinical trials. Who are the clinical research sites and investigators? So this is the encyclopedia rather than each pharma company or biotech company creating their own encyclopedia. So that's Reference Data . Link is deep data, and that is. Think about it more as deep data, a large corpus of data, complicated data model, curated by Veeva, a curated data model with a very specialized interface on top of it, user interface.
So you could consider it sort of something like a Bloomberg Terminal. The first and most advanced Link application is called Key People. That's an application that lets our pharmaceutical companies that are our customers keep track of the 1 million or so key opinion leaders around the world and follow them, and what are they doing, and who are the emerging key opinion leaders, and quickly understand what, what they're doing. So sort of like a, a curated LinkedIn on steroids, if you would say, that's very, very specific to life sciences. We have a few thousand people, data stewards and machine learning algorithms, that are curating this type of data every day. They're not our employees, they're contractors, and it's a balance of humans, very specialized humans, doing specific tasks and machine learning automation. We're gonna extend Link to the clinical areas as well.
You'll see that theme in the data. We started in the commercial area, we're gonna extend to clinical. Compass is another newer area for us, and that's for transaction data specific to the U.S. market. So anonymous patient data, projected prescribing data of prescriptions and procedures, and national and state-level sales data. This is data that pharmaceutical companies use to do incentive compensation, to do segmentation and targeting. This is the traditional area where people have used, the IQVIA, the old IMS products for many, many years. This is a place where we're innovating here, and I think we're doing the equivalent level of innovation as we did, like, moving from client server software to cloud.
What we're doing in Compass is a very disruptive innovation that some people are gonna get and are gonna adopt, but it's gonna happen slowly 'cause it's a disruptive innovation. I fundamentally think we're building a better mousetrap, and that's a, that's a very exciting area for us. And then Pulse Data, that's what we'll be introducing that product later on this year. That's where we'll make a data set based on the activity in our applications. So if you look at our CRM application, for example, we do know what's going on in the industry. How are pharmaceutical companies reaching, you know, urologists in the Midwest? Well, we know that. We know that because that's recorded in our system. Now, the trick is to produce that data, produce that data set of data in a privacy safe way globally ar ound the world, and use that to enable pharmaceutical companies, for example, to do better segmentation and targeting or engagement planning by knowing what the industry is doing.
And the same will apply to clinical. If there was—if, you know, you can project into the future, a lot of people using the Veeva clinical applications, we might be able to produce a data set that provides visibility into the clinical trial ecosystem. How many people are on clinical trials? For a clinical trial in this specific disease area, what is the dropout rate? Is Canada trending up and Brazil trending down or not? What's going on? There's—I hope you realize there's no visibility into that. There's visibility into prices for stocks that's collected, and you all look at that, and you can analyze that.
There's not that visibility into what's going on with clinical trials, which are actually experiments on humans, and very expensive ones. That's the type of innovation Veeva can bring with the Pulse Data, and that's another very important point of why Veeva is a public benefit corporation. That has to be done right to have the trust of the industry and to do the right thing. There's not a software platform behind this data, but there is a platform behind this data, and that's the common data architecture. So to do something like this across commercial and clinical, you're gonna have to make some decisions, such as, well, how many disease areas are there? Maybe there's 40, maybe there's 90. What are they called? What's the definition of them? How many kinds of healthcare providers are there? Maybe there's 9, maybe there's 14, maybe there's 12.
How many specialties are there? Those are the decisions, the medical ontology, that Veeva will make so that we can provide a comprehensive data set in two areas: Clinical and Commercial, across Reference Data, Deep Data, Transaction Data, and Pulse Data. That's the trick that we're trying to do. So I know that's a lot of things to take in, but if you wanna summarize it, we're trying to innovate in data in at least as significant a way as we innovated in software. Now, there's some things here that's different. So, for example, Pulse Data. Pulse Data is actually not possible for anybody else to produce because you would need access to what's going on in our system, and that, you know, that's not for sale. So it's a very interesting set of data that we can produce.
Now, I talked to... I showed the slide there. There's about 50 different applications, but they're all in different levels of maturity, and so we, we think about that. This product quadrant shows that every new product that we have or product area, it'll start in the lower left. It'll be a immature product with a low market share, guaranteed, when we announce it, right? What we wanna do is move it up to the upper right, where it becomes a-- it's a mature product, it has a ma-- high market share, it's adding a lot of value for the industry and for Veeva, and that takes some time to get there. So you'll see two of our, our big areas, CRM and commercial content, they're up to and to the right. They're the market-leading applications, they're quite mature. We have to keep innovating on those things, for sure.
But we have other products, like Compass. It's very early. Small number of customers. Very, very early product. We have to keep with it, make that product excellent, get that adoption, first with the early adopters, and move it up and to the right. So that's conceptually simple. We're all just moving orange balls up and to the right. You know, a lot of work behind that, but that's what we're doing. Another way to look at what we're doing is, before Veeva started, it was more like on the left. You had a bunch of legacy software and legacy data sets that were all siloed in very different areas, and they didn't fit together, and that was just what you did. Because, by the way, if you're a biotech company, a pharma company, it's not like you can operate your company without a drug safety system. You just can't...
It's not gonna work. You're not gonna just say, "Well, it's pretty simple. I'll just keep it on Excel," and, "Ah, maybe I'm not gonna keep track of my patients in my clinical trial," or, "Maybe I'm just not gonna get them to sign an informed consent form." You can't do that. It's a highly, highly regulated industry. So they had these disparate little applications that didn't fit together. I think now we're well on our way to fitting the software applications together. That's in the middle. Now, we certainly, you know, have a lot more room to grow. Some of our products are not mature, not all of the customers have all of our products, but we can see what we're doing there. But going forward, we wanna have the connected software and the connected data working together.
So our software should be very aware of our data and operate well on our data, on our common data architecture. So our common data architecture, those things we talked about, that will become very well known to our software, and that's really what you want. You know, if you're a pharmaceutical or biotech company, which many of you invest in these companies, what I think you would find when you dig in it, what they're trying to become more efficient and effective, and the only way to do that is through digital. Digital is really software and data and an operating model working together. That's the only way, or you can just tell your people to work harder and get smarter. You know, there's a limit to that. You have to apply, sometimes they would say, technology, right?
I prefer to use the word digital, and that sounds amorphous, but software, data, and an operating model, that's how you get efficiency. That's what Veeva is selling. Software and data that fits together, consulting to help with the operating model, and the services that you need, that's what we're selling. We're selling efficiency, tools for efficiency. We're not biologists. That's. Our customers are biologists. We're digital people. So now I'm gonna talk about the opportunity. It is a big opportunity. It starts with the industry, you know, pharma, biopharma, med tech is about a $2 trillion industry. It's growing. Why is it growing? The science is evolving. We're curing stuff that couldn't be cured before, and, you know, people want that. They want quality of life and they want life itself. So it's a really good industry that's nowhere near solved.
Life sciences is not like producing refrigerators. You know, there's a lot of unknowns in how the body works and a lot of unmet needs, so it's got a long runway of growth. Computers are much more understood than the human brain, that's for sure. So our opportunity, we view that as a $20 billion TAM, and the way we calculate that is, you know, 1% of the overall industry. So why, why do we think that way? Well, what are we selling? We're selling digital, industry-specific software, industry-specific data sets, the services around that to make the life sciences industry be more efficient and effective. That is definitely worth 1%. That's how you get efficiency. It's that important. Now, especially if, you know, Veeva starts to become a standard in certain areas, there is a compounding network effect. You know, why is Microsoft Word quite good?
Well, it's a quite a good product, but also it's quite good because the business partners that you work with are also gonna send you Word documents, and they know how to use Word, and the person you hired knows how to use Word, so there's a network effect. There's that same network effect with Veeva technology. There's a lot of people that know how to deal with it and how to talk with it, so it's becoming a standard in that way. So the other way to look at it is, of the products that we have today, and if we look at bottoms up, in which we do internally, the products that we have today, they represent well over 50% of this total TAM.
Now, there's more products we have to make and introduce, et cetera, but we have a clear line of sight to this TAM. Now, Veeva has to help the industry, you know, because otherwise we're not a durable company. If Veeva doesn't help the industry, we're not a durable company, and that's one of the things also you can take away. Veeva is probably one of the more durable companies you will ever meet, even though it may not sound like it. Veeva is set up to run for generations. Why? Well, it's when you look at it, these are interconnected pieces automating an industry, and an industry that's not likely to go away because it has a lot of innovation going. So we're really and we're set up to be a public benefit corporation, so we're not going to get over our skis and hurt the corporation.
So that's... We're set up to be durable, and I, I, we really want to, for every dollar we take in, we have to deliver at least two dollars of value; otherwise, it's not helping the industry. And I think, I think we can certainly do that with our digital solutions, again, because it's the only way you can get true efficiency. It's the only way you can move the needle. So that's about our TAM, and we're about 12% penetrated in our TAM based on our projections for our revenue ending 2024. Long, long way to go. Inside that $20 billion, here's how it breaks down by area. Clinical and commercial, those are the two biggest areas because they-- that's where the most of the work gets done and the most of the applications are.
Quality is actually quite big because also there's a lot of products in there, but that spreads out to companies like contract manufacturers and other service providers, whereas our clinical products, that's only applicable if you're running a clinical trial. Our products in the quality area for manufacturing and for regulated processes, they span far and wide. Regulatory and safety, definitely very important areas, but they're smaller in scope. So that's how it breaks down by area. And then, a good product strategy is all fine, and a good market is all fine, but, you know, what's in short supply is execution, and we have a part of our operating model inside of Veeva, we say, "Execution matters most," and we've said that for 15 years. So it's what you do.
So how we execute, we have a good product strategy and good strategy for each product. When we make a product, we wanna innovate and hire the best product team and just keep at it to have product excellence. Customer success is key, and, you know, that's our reference selling model. So 90% of the effort inside Veeva every day across thousands of people, goes towards customer success, 'cause that's what the customer really will care about. Let's say we have 50 products and a customer starts using four of them. Their impression of Veeva, Veeva the brand, will be, "Well, how did it go with those projects?" That's the impression. So that's, that's where the bulk of the effort is at Veeva, and it's distributed around 7,000 people. That's why we talk about customer success a lot.
There's a benefit to having a lot of products, because you have cross-sell. The negative is, let's say we have an opportunity for 20 products in a customer. If we stink it up in one area, that's—we're not just losing the opportunity in that area, we're losing half of that other 20… right? It's so you have a downside when we have to be more cautious. A bad product causes us more problems than it would cause a standalone product company. So we have to really, really be cautious on that. But if we follow our operating model, that'll lead to strong growth and profitability, and it's, it's because of our values.
We have everybody in Veeva has a consistent set of values, they know the operating model, and we have the trust of our customers. So that's the operating model that we call the Veeva Way, and it's a written document in Veeva. When you come into Veeva, whatever your role is, you read the operating model, and you try to understand it. You try to understand, "Well, if I'm in product management, okay, that's how it relates for a product. That's what it means, and that's how product management relates to engineering and sales. That's what it is, and here are the metrics." So it's not a free-for-all. It's more like a manufacturing process. This operating model leads into some interesting financials.
So this is a chart that shows our spend, where we spend the money on the subscription side of our business. This has not related to do with our professional services side of the business. This is our subscription, where we're making products. So we spend 2.5 times as much in product than we do in sales and marketing, 2.5 times. And in product is what you'd expect: research and development, you know, software engineering, that type of things, and also delivering the service. So the cost of the compute and the monitoring, the operations, 2.5 times the sales and marketing. I feel good about that because, you know, we use a reference selling model, and we actually don't want a customer to buy a product that doesn't fit.
If you spend too much on your sales and marketing, that might happen. You might have a customer buying a product that doesn't fit, which is a negative to us. We definitely don't wanna do that. So we keep the sales and marketing costs low. That means we can pour the money into the product. If we're smart about what we're doing, all things considered, if you're smart about what you're doing in your products and you spend more money in the products, you will end up with better products. Better products get a better price. You know, you see that in cars, right? The higher quality car gets the higher quality price. That's the same way with software. It's not just... If your product delivers more value, you get a better price for it.
The way to do it is to invest smartly in your products. That's the—I've always thought that's the best way to get sales and marketing and efficiency, is make a better product that sells for a higher price, rather than hire, hire more salespeople. So that's... I guess this is just the proof that we're living our operating model. You know, you can see it in our financials. I think customers appreciate this. This is where they want to see us spending. And it's, it's delivered good results to investors. We've always been frugal with our money. We raised a total of $7 million venture capital. In the history of the company, we only used $3 million. I guess I figured I needed that extra buffer. And we've always, you know, grown our revenue and profit.
We always wanted to just run a reasonable business, that, that's profitable, and that's the way you can, you know, decide your self-worth, is: Are the customers willing to pay more than it costs you to produce what you're doing? Okay, then there must be some value there. And if not, it's inescapable. You're not producing value if, if the customers don't pay more than what it costs to make it. So I've always viewed it as a barometer. If we couldn't be profitable, something was wrong, and we had to fix it. And if we couldn't grow, we're running out of ideas or something else is wrong. So this is a measurement of the health of our customer relationships and our contribution to the industry, so I'm pretty proud about that because it represents what we're doing.
We also try to be transparent with our investors, our shareholders, and give long-term goals. So in 2015, we gave our first long-term goal. We said, "You know, we're at a billion-- we're, we're gonna be $1 billion in 2020." In 2015, we said that. I don't know, we might have been $300 million in revenue, and I had really not for sure how we were... You know, we were still a relatively young company, and I didn't know, you know, how that was gonna all happen to 2020. But I thought, you know, well, there was a, a few things and a few plans we had, and if we executed hard, we'd put that vision out there, and we'd make it. And we, and we did.
We made it a year early, and so we made it then a 2025 goal of $3 billion, and we're on track to meet that about a year early, and we'd like to make a 2030 goal here when the time is right. So this is our way to provide transparency to investors too, similar to we. This is our financial long-term plan. In the same way to customers, we're giving our product plan, our long-term product plan. So we wanna tell you where we're going and hold ourself accountable and do the best we can to meet these goals, and so far, we've done that. So I'll finish where we started. We have a big market opportunity. You saw that. We focus on products, and you'll see that as real, as reflected in our financials.
Have a proven operating model, and that translates into a long runway of growth. I think we have three minutes for Q&A. All right.
Can fit some-
Awesome.
You know, this is obviously a big conference.
Do I sit down? Do I stand up?
Up to you.
I'll stand up. I'll sit down.
All right. Big conference, I'm sure a lot of your customers are walking the narrow hallways. I'm curious, you know, what have those conversations been like, and you think you could frame the state of the industry right now?
Yeah, I think it is. Every JPM is different. Some things aren't different, right? There's a lot of walking, you go up and down hills, there's rain and wind. That's the same, but it has a different flavor, and it's very fresh. The sentiment that you get is the leading indicator of other things. You can't see it in the results yet. I sense, I sense more optimism than last year. I sense more optimism in the CEOs, more optimism in general. Not. I didn't use the word exuberance, it's not that, but I sense slightly more, more optimism, cautious optimism. Now, that might sound like a real squishy thing. I, I think that actually matters, and I don't. I've. I had enough one-on-one conversations, probably at least 30 one-on-one conversations, and I don't, I don't think you miss that signal.
I think it's irrelevant. So that's probably... I didn't know if I would see that, and I think I am. I don't know exactly what's causing it. I think probably that's the science, people getting enthused. I was talking to one CEO, and they're, they have a cell therapy, an allogeneic cell therapy, and they've got their first 15 patients on it, and it's saved those patients' lives, and they're really into it, and they think they can maybe do that in other therapeutic areas, right? So that's caused like, "Okay, wow!" That's, you know... So there's that kind of enthusiasm around the science that's going on.
Nice. I was wondering if we could talk about competitive differentiation. One of the highlights in your presentation was the tight integration on both the commercial and development side. I wonder if we can get a little bit more specific there. You know, why is it important to have a development side, be able to communicate and have it on the same platform as a commercial side? Like, is there a specific example you could give to help paint that picture?
Well, the most important thing that people want, they want, like, in the Development Cloud, in an area, and then there's application, they want that application to really, really, really work. So that is the most important thing they want, they want. Next thing they want is the suite to work together, and next thing they want is the Development Cloud to work together. So that's what the most important is. What we can do to help the industry is we can connect. And that's how people buy. They buy by their area, right? But what we can do is we can then connect up clinical to commercial so that they have one common view of the data and the processes. That'll allow them to serve their customers better. But it's interesting, that's not what customers buy. They buy to solve a problem.
What they get is ending up value because the pieces fit together, so we feel pretty good about that. But it's very interesting, that's not what people buy.
Interesting. Then finally, just, you know, what are you most excited for coming into 2024?
I'm most excited to go home today and, like, be in a quiet room without a lot of people. You know, as an introvert, it's kinda hard, but what am I most excited about? I'm excited about our product strategy. I think we have our product strategy figured out, and we have a lot of really hard work to do for multiple years, and that kind of feels good. What can be more frustrating is you're trying to figure out what to do. You know, you wanna work hard, you wanna do a good job, but you, as a company, can't figure out what to do. That's frustrating.
Last year was great because we, you know, made a clear decision about the Salesforce platform. We made a clear decision to go very deep into the Data Cloud area, and we made a couple of really, really fundamental decisions in our clinical products area and our quality products area. So I feel like we just got good work to do. And maybe the other one is, you know, I feel like we have good customer relationships, and that, for me, makes Veeva a good place to work. It makes it good for our people because they're working around customers that appreciate them, that makes them feel good. They bring that home to their families. You know, it's not... So, I'm pretty enthused about that.
That's super helpful. Well, thank you so much for being here with us.
All right. Thank you.
Take care.
Thanks, everyone.