Morning, everyone, and welcome to the last day of the 26th Annual Needham Growth Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald, and I lead the digital health research efforts here at Needham. This morning, we're saving, we'll call it the best for last. A good way to finish out the conference, but it's my pleasure to be joined by the team from Veeva. We've got CFO Brent Bowman and Senior Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Paul Shawah. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today.
Our pleasure. Thank you.
Thanks, Ryan.
Great. So for those who are dialed in, we've got about 40 minutes for this fireside chat. I've got a list of questions, obviously, for Brent and Paul, but if you do have questions for them, that you'd like to get asked and answered, feel free to put it into the chat, and then I'll make sure to keep an eye on that as we go through and make sure you get those questions answered. But with that, we'll dive right in. So Brent, Paul, while I would be shocked if anyone listening today were unfamiliar with Veeva, let's start with just a brief overview of the business for anyone living under a rock the last decade.
Yeah. Thanks, Ryan. I can give you a quick overview. So we're—we talk about Veeva as we're building the industry cloud for life sciences, and we mean software, data, and services. High-value services, implementation service, but things like business consulting. We're now 15 years in as a company, where our aspiration is to become a strategic partner to the industry, providing all of those capabilities, software, data, and services, and we do it across commercial and R&D. And it's generally how life sciences companies are structured. They have the group that develops the medicines through clinical trials processes, and they have the side of the. And that's called R&D, and then they have the side that does the commercialization, bringing those medicines to market.
We have products, suites of products, in each of those areas. So, for example, in R&D, what you'll hear us talk about things like clinical data management, clinical operations, regulatory, quality, and safety. And then on the commercial side, you'll hear us talk about some of our product categories across software and data. In the software area, areas like core area like CRM, our commercial content business, our marketing analytics business with Crossix, and then some very data-specific businesses. Our Compass, which is some of the data that life sciences companies buy to do things like find patients and segment and target their customers. So that's how we're organized, and think about it as five main areas in R&D, five main areas in commercial.
Many, many products in each of them, and part of our unique strategy is to deliver really great products that all work together. We're in the early stages of a significant opportunity.
Absolutely, and a lot of great products and opportunities-
Mm-hmm
... for growth here, and we'll definitely dive into those, as we go through the conversation. But just to frame up maybe the conversation for investors, I wanna start with maybe some of the recent events and just, sort of talk through those a little bit. And really want to take us back to sort of the third quarter pre-announcement at the Analyst Day. You know, you talked about that, you know, you were lowering your guide a bit as a result of sort of life sciences companies tightening their belts, and so that had a bit of an impact in Q4, but also sort of into 2024. Can you just talk, sort of refresh investors, you know, what you're seeing in terms of the macro headwinds and when you started to see that?
Yeah, happy to dig into that. So yeah, you're referring to the Q3 earnings call, where-
Mm
... we described the macro, a little slightly worse, really specifically in our services business.
Mm.
If you think about our services business, it's of what we do, it's the more discretionary piece. Our subscription software business is really strategic foundational technology. So look, we can talk about a bit about that in a second, but specifically, what we said is on our services business, we have two pieces of our service business: implementation and post-implementation services.
Mm.
So on the post-implementation services, that's probably the most discretionary, so think about business consulting, other sort of customization work that might be done. We saw that get delayed, deferred, or skinny down a bit.
Mm.
So we saw a bit of that, and then on the implementation services, those implementations are still going on, they're still happening-
Mm
... but we saw some customers take a bit of a more economical approach. And what we mean by that is, you know, maybe can we co-source, like use some of our resources with your resources? So we saw some of that play out, and that had an impact on our guide-
Mm
... as we looked at fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025. But I think most importantly, if you take a step back, we, the, the subscription business, we didn't see an incremental headwind or anything like that. What we've seen is kind of a continuation of what we've seen over the last 18 months, 2 years-
Yeah
... there are pockets of additional scrutiny because these are large, strategic, multi-year, arrangements. You know, we're not seeing those deals go away.
Mm.
We're not losing those deals to competition, so we feel really good about kind of our positioning and momentum there.
Yeah, and maybe just as an additional point of clarification, obviously life sciences, biotech, if we're kind of grouping those together, it's obviously been a challenged market for, like you said, the last 12, maybe 18 months, and we've seen sort of other companies see impacts earlier. Can you just maybe clarify, like, why maybe it was, Veeva was later to see those impacts, and do you think it's a continuation of just what we've already seen, or is there sort of an incremental concern going into calendar year 2024 here?
Yeah, what we... Our view and our position and how we've guided is that the macro doesn't get significantly better-
Mm
... and does not significantly worse.
Mm.
Why do we think that? It's a couple of-- You know, it's what I just said a few minutes ago in that-- what we sell is foundational, and these are, you know, 60-, 90-day sales cycles. When you hear us announce a large clinical win or a quality win or, you know, a commercial win, these are typically deals that have been progressed over a year to 2 years, and they're gonna cut across any near-term headwinds.
Mm-hmm.
So I think what we see is, okay, maybe instead of a deal closing in Q3, it closes in Q4.
Yeah.
It's not... So that's the type of things we're seeing. So we're, in our view and how we're guiding, we're not assuming any incremental, you know, macro headwinds.
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe just to get a sense of, like, more recent sentiment, obviously, one of the largest healthcare, or if not the largest healthcare conference, you know, happened last week on the West Coast, you know, with a lot of your customers sort of participating in that. Just would love to get your sense on, you know, what you felt like the... How much was there optimism in the industry, still caution? Are any updated view over the last few week?
Yeah, I attended the conference last week. This is-
Mm
... obviously, it's a very important conference for the healthcare industry.
Absolutely.
So, you know, I think Peter probably summarized it best. So post his presentation, he was asked a question. He said: "You were here a year ago-
Yeah.
You're here, you're here now. Like, kind of, what's the, what's your feeling? What are you getting?
Mm.
To paraphrase him, you know, he spoke to over 30 leaders of life science companies, and his takeaway was cautious optimism relative to the prior year. And I think what he was really getting at is the momentum in drug development and in the science, and then that underlying kind of you could feel a little bit more excitement around that.
Mm.
I think that Peter could feel that in all of those business conversations. Now, those aren't financial metrics, right, per se-
Mm
... but I think it's good to understand the feeling of the industry and the leadership of-
Right
... of large life sciences companies.
That's great to hear. It's great to hear. Okay, we've made it four whole questions. I've got to ask about CRM transition now, or our audience might riot. So obviously, that's a big topic for fiscal 2025 and beyond on the Vault CRM transition here, and I believe the current plan was to sort of have some of your first customers live by your Summit in May. You know, sort of before we kind of hit early adopter, maybe help level set investors on why the shift away from Salesforce towards Vault for CRM, and how confident are you in the ability to maintain sort of that strong market share you have in the CRM space?
Yeah. So first, just maybe one clarification. We have first customer live, we're moving. Just to kind of refresh everybody on the timing, we announced this, I think it was roughly December 1st of 2022, so it's now about 13 months since we've announced it. We're moving very fast. We actually had our first customer live, go live last year in roughly the fourth quarter of last year. So we're moving very quick. We're executing well. We'll have additional customers going live. We signed our first last year. We signed a couple of additional ones. They'll go live in the beginning part of this year.
Right.
So, these are new companies, companies that are having their first CRM system. The first companies that migrate, they'll migrate over starting in 2025.
Mm.
So that's when we'll see some of those. And we've had a couple of customers commit to migrating already, particularly two large, two top 20 companies, Bayer and GSK, and they've talked about that publicly as to what their strategy is and why they're doing that, and for them, it was all about innovation. They said, "Hey, we're, we're looking forward. Like, we, we have something that's great and that works, and it's the market-leading CRM. We're gonna focus on the future and innovating." So that has been, that's been really positive and a good indicator of the momentum that we have. Now, the why we did this, why did we make that decision, it plays out in their comments.
Mm-hmm.
We made the decision to have complete control so that we can innovate, and we've announced a number of innovations. Just in the last six months, we've announced integrated service, integrated marketing, patient engagement, and a patient CRM system. These are really significant areas and the significant value that we can create for customers that we wouldn't otherwise have been able to do.
Mm.
So that's the why, is innovation and moving forward. And then, you know, I think your question on... It's related to your question on the confidence.
Yeah.
How do we have the confidence in, you know, our market position and what that's gonna look like? Our strategy is two things. One is innovate, make it, make it better, so we're going to deliver. We have the market-leading product. It's they're only gonna get something that's better, and that's with a lot of the innovations that I just talked about. But the second part of that is also make it really easy for them to get there. We have a clear path for customers to get there. Migrating is a whole lot easier and a whole lot less expensive than doing anything, and less risky, than doing anything else.
Yeah.
So I think if we innovate and make it better and we make it easy, that's our strategy. It's pretty simple.
Yeah, and usually, you know, I think in these situations, you more start seeing smaller customers that will sort of go along the migration path first, but you, you sort of bucked that trend, and with Bayer and GSK, with, you know, massive customers here that are sort of committing early to, to Vault CRM and, and sort of that transition early on. You know, I'd be curious, like, you know, how did you get, you know, two large customers like this, you know, to, to sort of make that commitment so early in the, in the process here?
... Yeah, you're, you're right. So, we move fast, but, but credit to them also-
Mm
These companies move very quickly, and they got to the decision. They did a lot of due diligence, right?
Mm.
They wanted to make sure that they really understood what was happening, and why it was happening, and what the benefits were, and we were clear on that and had those discussions. And for them, it was about getting to clarity, something that the right decision that they believe for them-
Mm-hmm
... and doing it quickly, doing it with speed. They wanna focus on innovating. They don't wanna focus on deliberation and analysis and, spending, honestly, a whole lot of time on something that they pretty much knew the answer to.
Right.
So, you know, I don't say that in a, you know, in a, in a dismissive sort of way at all. It's something they took very, very seriously. But it became clear that this was the right, the right path, focusing on the future. So we're excited about that. Not every company will go at the same pace.
Mm.
Certainly, you're gonna have companies that decide to go early, you're gonna have companies that decide to go later, and there's no right or wrong here, right? You know, for these companies, they wanted to move with speed and get to the future state as fast as they could.
Mm-hmm. Now, in the past, and, you know, we've seen that sort of on these first customers, when you go through the migration process, sort of, you know, it can take... You take a bit more time on the front end when you're going through the migration, make sure you're getting it right, but then it helps you sort of establish a playbook for future migrations. I guess, as you think about the Bayer and GSK migrations, how important is the pace with which you're able to get them migrated over as we look over the next couple of years here?
You're right. I mean, they will be trailblazers. They-
Mm.
... they will be going first, certainly the first largest companies.
Mm-hmm.
So they're on the front end of that, and that sometimes means we'll go through some bumps together.
Mm.
They understand that, and they appreciate that, and we're gonna make sure that they're successful, and we're gonna learn with them, and they're gonna establish the path for the rest of the industry.
Mm-hmm.
It's not unlike... This is not an unusual process for us.
Mm.
It's not unlike any product that we introduce in the marketplace. So you can somewhat think of them as the early adopters early in a migration instead of early in picking a new product.
Mm-hmm. And I get this will be a multi-year transition, but as you're starting to have some of those early conversations, what level of visibility would you say you have in terms of sort of the CRM roadmap for, you know, the remainder of the top twenty at this point?
Yeah, we're certainly in conversations with all of our large customers, many of our small customers. Some small customers are ready to talk about it, and others certainly have other things. But I would say in the mid- to large-sized companies, we're talking to nearly all of them. So that gives us pretty good visibility. And I do think there'll be that mix. It'll look like some will be ready to go, some that we talk to, and they're like, "Hey, we got it, like, we wanna go. We wanna go in 2025. We're ready to do that.
Mm.
Others say things like, "Hey, we, we have a launch in 2025-
Mm
... and, you know, we wanna go soon after that launch. We'll start in 2026.
Mm.
So let's put those conversations on hold. We wanna have them, just not right now." So we'll see that mix. It'll. You'll see companies go at different timings for a variety of different reasons.
Got it. And as you think about sort of anytime you have sort of re-platforming or change in this sort of manner, obviously some customers will wanna take that opportunity to re-evaluate options in the market. Maybe we start seeing RFPs in this space. How are you trying... Or are there any strategies you're putting in place to try to, you know, prevent that sort of RFP process from happening? And maybe, Brent, on your side, is there- is Veeva, you know, interested at all in, you know, providing financial incentives, ramping deal structures, anything to try to, you know, again, try to keep those customers on Veeva versus trying to go out to RFP?
The strategy is to continue to execute well.
Mm-hmm.
We gotta build a great product, which we're doing, and we now have customers live on it and customers committed. It's to make it very easy or as easy as possible to get there, and it's to make it great. Like, it's the strategy is very simple. We're not doing unusual or unnatural things to try to force a customer to make a decision, right? We're going to, we're gonna go down the path of providing them something that's great and that's easy, easiest to get to.
Mm.
So that's the strategy. In terms of RFPs, some companies think of it as the, like, there's not a good use of time, and we're not gonna spend any effort and energy in an RFP, particularly those companies who have this clarity on their decision-making process. Other companies are forced to do one.
Yeah.
Sometimes their procurement process dictates that they have to do an RFP.
Mm.
And so we'll see, we'll see everything.
Yeah
... over the course of the next couple of years. Those that don't do one, those that do one, and that are perhaps even forced to, or those that want to. All of those will happen, but we're ready for all of them. And our strategy doesn't change. For any mix of those customers, our strategy is the same: deliver a better, an even better product. It's the market-leading product. We're gonna innovate there and make it as easy as possible to get there.
We're gonna charge a fair fee for that, for the value they're getting, and we're gonna treat this like any other product launch migration-
Mm
... and how we, how we price.
Sure.
So yeah, that's just our approach, and it's fundamental to how we operate.
... Excellent. I don't think. Okay, I think we're done with my CRM questions for now. I can't guarantee for the audience, but we'll move on to some other exciting growth levers across the business as well. So in commercial, in particular, you know, Crossix in the Data Cloud initiatives, I think have are really important, I think, for the growth of the business, of the commercial business over the next few years. Starting on the Crossix side, so earlier last year, you had noted some weakness in the Crossix business, but that's appeared to recover in third quarter, with Peter noting a strong bookings quarter.
You know, we've seen softer marketing spend across the industry in 2023, but do the recent improvements feel more anomalous to you, or do you expect marketing spend to, sort of, growth start re-accelerating as we go into 2024 and 2025?
Yeah. So our Crossix business, this is measurement and optimization-
Mm-hmm
... campaigns and audience targeting. This was the first area when the macro started to hit that we felt it a bit, where marketing budgets, and this is our fiscal 2023, calendar 2022-
Yeah.
We felt that impact. And now if you fast-forward into fiscal year 2024 and how we're looking out at 25, it's playing out. There was no surprises in 2024. The word, I don't know if I like to use the word stabilization, but it played out as we expected in 2024, and it has been, you know, a contributor to our commercial growth in fiscal year 2024, and we expect it to also be a driver of growth in the fiscal year 2025. So, you know, it's just a function of executing well on our product team and continuing to advance those products and adding value. So, we're not seeing anything getting a step function worse. It's playing out nicely, as expected.
That's helpful. And Paul, would you say... I mean, we've seen a big shift over the last couple of years on sort of sales and marketing spend, you know, with life sciences companies shift more digital, and obviously, the ROIs there, I think, are proven to be much higher than in some of the traditional channels. Do you, when you're talking to customers, do you still see that intent to continue that mix shift towards sort of digital spend over time?
There was an acute spike that happened-
Mm-hmm
... certainly during the pandemic.
Mm-hmm.
And what we saw were things somewhat normalized from that. They started to return back. So I would say it's more digital than it was four years ago, and it's less digital than it was during the spike in the pandemic, and I think it's starting to hit a steady state.
Yes, you'll continue to see those channels become, you know, continue to be used, and adopted, and tested, and experimented with, but I think the industry has started to settle down in terms of, you know, like, "Oh, my gosh, what should the spend mix look like, and the channel mix look like?" And, you know, there was a lot of learnings that happened, and it was actually good for the industry to be able to start to become more efficient and take advantage of new technology, and, that generally is a good thing.
So I think the industry's ended up in a better place, but I would say a little bit more of a steady state than it has been over the past couple of years.
Makes sense. Maybe shifting onto the data initiatives, we'll start with Link. You've obviously seen some great success with Link for Key People, and there's a nice roadmap for more Link offerings, you know, continuing to scale. You know, we've also seen softness, though, in sort of business contact data, commercialization-type data in terms of the spending there over the last year, you know, and we've seen that weakness kind of come through in the ZoomInfo and the Definitive Healthcare-type companies. But, you know, I'm curious, with Link, has your outlook around the market opportunity for that offering diminished at all in the past year, just given what we've seen around sort of tighter spending on data?
No, no. Link, what we're doing with Link is pretty unique.
Mm-hmm.
Like, it's really, we've created a platform to generate these real-time data applications. This is real-time intelligence on, you mentioned Key People, that's one of our products.
Mm-hmm.
It was our first one. It's done very, very well in the marketplace, and then now we have a number of products that are following that. In the commercial side, also expanding into R&D.
Mm-hmm
... in the new Data Cloud. So we're excited about kind of where that is. It's unique, it's highly differentiated, it's really valuable data to life sciences companies. These are things that life sciences datasets that life sciences companies need, and they either buy a dataset for it, or they kind of source it in a variety of different ways, manual or service-based offerings, or those sort of things. We're delivering this via technology and software. We're combining software and data together. So, I'm feeling good about where we are with Link and the trajectory, the momentum and the trajectory. I don't see that changing.
Excellent. Moving to Compass, you know, it's another product that's earlier on the maturity curve, but you've been innovating quickly on it. You've got Compass for Patient that's been available, but Prescriber and National rolling out, I believe that this month. You know, have you seen any pent-up demand for the new datasets at all? And, you know, additionally, what sort of unlock do you think these two new datasets can have on adoption and sort of drive better market share gains against, you know, some of the established incumbents like IQVIA?
You're right on your timing and the products. Patient's been available-
Mm-hmm
... Prescriber and National are coming this month. The exciting news in that is that we'll have the complete suite of products that we need to replace a legacy data provider. That's exciting. So it's an exciting space to be. In terms of pent-up demand, I would say no, primarily because we haven't really been marketing and positioning ahead of the launch and the availability of these products, and we're just really focused on that patient market. So, I wouldn't think about it that way. Now, does it create a tailwind for us? It creates a really nice opportunity for us to be that full replacement. That was always - that was not something we could have done before, and now we are able to do that.
So we can, we can become the sole provider for a life sciences company, and I, I'm sure we'll see that happen, starting on the small business side. And then over time, the goal is to have that happen for an enterprise customer.
Interesting. Like, what are the challenges of... And you've done this coming in and sort of innovating in an industry where, you know, you just started with CRM, you're doing it quite a bit in R&D. What are the challenges with sort of, you know, replacing or displacing an incumbent vendor? Because what's kind of been interesting to us in our checks recently is I started to hear the sort of old adage of, you know, how you know, "You'll never lose your job for hiring IBM," you know, and but that being applied to sort of IQVIA a little bit in the data space. So how do you sort of combat against sort of that mentality in the industry?
There is some reality to that.
Mm-hmm
... until there's something that's way better-
Yeah
... and then you get fired for choosing the old thing - and not for choosing the new thing.
Yeah.
So the way to get around that is innovating. We have to be that much better. We have to be our product has to be better, the data quality has to be better, the speed of the data, the service that we provide, the connectivity into other data sets and our software products. So those are some of the things we're doing to create something that is unique and much better than what is already available in the marketplace, and that we're proving those out. Like everything I just talked about, better data quality, better delivery and speed, better service to our customers, openness, using our data and providing our access to the full uni- when a brand licenses our data, the access to the full universe.
Right.
That's highly unique and creates a lot of value. So yes, there will always be some switching cost, regardless of what that happens to be, whether it's some pressure by the vendor to lock them in and use some of their market power, or whether it's something else. We have to be better, and usually it takes those first companies that the early adopter. It's like crossing the chasm. It's those first companies that are visionary. They see, they see something different. They want some advantage. They do that until you've built up that critical mass, and then it starts to go into the masses. So not unlike any product, I expect that's what we'll see playing out.
Yeah, it'll be exciting to watch for sure. So, okay, let's shift over to the R&D business. You know, a lot of exciting growth drivers there. Your Development Cloud's only, I think, about 10% penetrated in the end market today, but, you know, there's really five categories within that, that are driving market share gains at varying levels of maturity. You've got clinical ops, clinical data, quality, regulatory, and safety. You know, maybe starting with clinical data, you, you've really made notable progress with EDC, you know, over the past year or two, and to the point where you now have, I think, six top 20 pharmas using the offering.
Can you talk about what's driven that strong progress, and how the visibility that these EDC contracts gives you as they ramp, and how that gives you confidence on the FY 2025 targets in that area?
Yeah.
Well, I-
I'll talk about the product and-
Sure
... what's driving that demand, and-
Look at us, we're fighting for the question.
There you go.
You know, it's related to... We talked about innovation in the data space. We're innovating, and we innovated in the EDC space, and that's what's driving the demand. We built a better product. The product is modern. It's allows companies to get their clinical trials started faster. It allows companies that once they're in process, if there's a change, which is called an amendment, they can adapt to those changes much faster than they could with legacy software. So we have this advantage in that we're modern and faster and designed and optimized for speed in the clinical trials process.
Mm.
That's super valuable. That's very, very important. You know how important days are. When you add days to the commercial life of a medicine because you've launched it faster-
Mm-hmm
... and you still have days on patent life, that's pretty valuable. So that has driven the demand. Of course, companies are gonna move at different paces. We've executed well. We now have six.
Mm-hmm.
We're in conversations with obviously the rest of large companies and mid and small-sized companies. EDC is as powerful and capable as it is for a large company. It's equally, you know, capable and an advantage for a small company.
Mm-hmm.
So we're selling across the entire market, and we're making good progress there.
These are just, as you know, these are multiyear predefined ELAs, typically.
Mm-hmm.
So they're not variable and trued up to actual trial volume or anything like that. So it could be, it could take 3, 4, 5 years for these to get to kind of the terminal value of a deal, because we kind of tie it to new clinical trial starts until you get to 100% on the ELA. So this gives us, you know, visibility-
Mm-hmm
... to those predefined ramps as we look out, and that, you know, that informs our guide as we look, you know, out to 2025.
... Yeah, it's great, great visibility to have, frankly, so that's good, that's good to hear. But Paul, you've also discussed that, you know, the success in EDC can unlock opportunities for newer adjacent products like ePRO or RTSM, you know, which I think you said combined could be as large of an end market, you know, as EDC over time. Can you provide a bit more color on how sort of that success can sort of drive that unlocking event? And, you know, how difficult do you expect it to be for some of these newer products to displace some of the, the incumbents there?
Yeah. So you're right. What we're building, and this is true in clinical and clinical data, but it's also true in many of our other suites, are these integrated suites of applications. Many products, multiple products that are working together, they're designed to work together, and that's what we're doing in the EDC space. EDC and the data from EDC flows into the clinical database, and the patient-reported outcomes that come from our ePRO product have to end up in the clinical database, also in the CDB, and it's also related to the randomization that happens. The distribution of the medicines to the right patients obviously impacts the milestones and the trials and the data that you capture. So all of these things are interconnected.
Mm-hmm.
So our strategy is, you know, as a customer establishes, starts in a specific place-
Mm-hmm
... happens to the EDC is leading those because it's been in the market longer. Adding the next one becomes even more valuable.
Mm-hmm
... and that's the benefit of these integrated suites of applications. We've seen that play out in many different areas. It's playing out in quality, it's playing out in clinical, it's played out in the commercial side in different parts of our business. So that gives us this unique advantage, and we talk about it as best of breed, like the best app, but also unified, these unified processes.
Mm-hmm.
Creates a lot of value for customers. You've probably heard at different events, we've had CIOs talk about this single platform and streamlining and bringing all of these processes together. That allows them to move... Yes, it's easier for the CIO to maintain, but it's better for the business. The business becomes more agile. They become faster. Technology becomes an enabler, not a barrier. If you have lots of systems that don't talk to each other, it's actually a barrier to doing business. It's ironic, but it becomes-
Mm-hmm
... a barrier. In our case, in our world, we're about enabling and speed and agility.
Yeah, absolutely. So then, as we look out, across the other categories within R&D, you know, what areas are you most excited about outside of the clinical, so say, across quality, regulatory, or safety moving forward?
Clinical's the largest in the R&D space, and-
Mm-hmm
... largest, and there's a lot to be excited about, which-
Yeah
... some of which we just, we talked about. Quality, I would, I'd pick. It's somewhat overlooked, but it's second largest to clinical, so it's a very, very significant market opportunity where we're building these really unique suites of applications, things that nobody has ever done before.
Mm-hmm.
The quality documentation and the quality management process and the lab results that come during the manufacturing process that determine whether you can ship a batch of product. And, you know, all of these pieces we're bringing together on a common platform, integrated, creating the connectivity. So really modern products all integrated together. Quality is an exciting area. I don't want to minimize what we're doing in regulatory and safety. Regulatory has been a nice contributor. Safety, we're in the early part of the market.
Mm-hmm.
We have two top twenties there. But you know... The nice thing about what we're doing, it's hard for us to answer that question 'cause it's like we have these five areas, and they're all different sizes, of course.
Yeah
... but they're all nice contributors. They're contributing to current growth, and they're gonna contribute to future growth, given the breadth of the portfolio, so a lot to be excited about.
I think the term is you love all your children equally.
That's right. Yeah, that's a nice way, that is a nice way of saying it.
Nice. Nice. Brent, as we look at fiscal 2024, fiscal 2025 guidance ranges, obviously, we already talked about sort of the updated expectations, you know, in the guide. But as you think about the growth versus profitability algorithm moving forward, how has that been forming sort of your process on hiring decisions? And sort of as you think about planning for the next couple of years here, do you continue to invest at similar levels or, you know, with a little bit of a top-line slowdown or some of the macro pressures, do you sort of moderate that down a little bit?
Yeah. Overall, our hiring strategy, you know, hasn't changed. You know, we're looking to have efficient growth, and-
Mm-hmm
... and if we find opportunities that we can accelerate, you know, the growth algorithm, we'll do that. If you look back over the last year to two years, we continued to hire. You know, we didn't do layoffs. We didn't freeze. But we always try to be thoughtful and disciplined in the moment and not get in over our skis.
Mm-hmm.
If you look at Q3, you did see a lower hiring rate.
Mm-hmm.
So we added a net 70 heads, and that was largely, you know, in part due to the needs of the services business. So we looked at the needs, and we wanna make sure we're balanced and have enough capacity, but, you know, not build too much. So we're very thoughtful around that. And what we've said is, we expect that lower rate of hiring to continue-
Mm-hmm
... through Q4.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, we're focused on that balance. It's always a tricky, you know, high-wire act, but we're looking to have efficient growth. And in about 45 days, we'll give you the update on op income, which will help you understand-
Mm-hmm
... a bit better.
Perfect. And, you know, I think one of the things that maybe a bit underappreciated by the market more broadly. As you think about the evolving competitive dynamics with sort of a non-traditional sort of life sciences company, like a Salesforce coming into the market, it's really hard to sell in an environment, in a vertical like this, in terms of you can have a great software salesperson, but if they don't understand the uniqueness of the life sciences market, you can really struggle in that sense. So how have you gone about sort of bringing in talent, but then, like, educating that talent to, you know, on the unique aspects of the end market? How much of a differentiator do you think that is in your motion?
So, there's the expertise of individuals, and training them, and getting them onboarded. And we, Veeva as a company now, we have lots of people that understand the industry.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
So bringing, you know, an incremental new hires in-
Mm-hmm
It's relatively easy for us. That's an easy, established process, getting them trained and up to speed, and a lot of that is on-the-job training, and they learn, and they're paired with experts, and they learn about the industry. Now, so how much of that is an advantage? I'd actually say the bigger advantage is less so in finding somebody who knows the industry.
Mm-hmm.
It's more about the depth in product, the ability-
Yeah
... to build really deep, products.
Mm-hmm.
That's very, very difficult.
Mm-hmm
... hard to do, and it's a different motion from a horizontal, like a company that's accustomed and whose DNA is centered around building something that's used by many industries, compared with somebody who's focused on building something, who's used very deep processes in a single industry.
Yeah.
That actually is the bigger advantage. The advantage is, it's a different motion. How do you... You know, I used to work for horizontal companies, and I've seen that story and that playbook. And when you're at a horizontal company that also does industries, those industries are—they're competing, they're often second-class citizens, they're all fighting for this horizontal resource. Like, "Hey, build my sampling feature.
Yeah.
You got somebody in home office who's like: What the heck is sampling? Like, we don't do sampling.
Yeah.
You know, they're like: I don't even know what that means, and what's a lot number?
Yeah.
You know, like, those kinds of things, those are real; they play out. So that's the bigger advantage than being able to bring in somebody with domain expertise. It's much deeper than domain expertise. That's why it's hard building enterprise software in this, and doing it over this very, very long period of time. We've done it over 15 years. We've learned things as we have gone along that have now become standard parts of our product. You don't replicate that overnight. So we feel good about our position, and I guess maybe the last, last comment I'll make on this is, we're delivering these suites of applications, right? So an entry point, we're gonna we have competitors in all different markets, but, you know, competing in one place is very hard, right? Because it's not what customers are looking for.
Customers are looking for these integrated suites of applications. In our commercial business, that happens to be things like the CRM working closely with the content management. All the digital content that they use feeds into the CRM. The data, this really unique data sets, feeds into the CRM, the marketing analytics feeds into the CRM.
Mm-hmm.
So we're selling something different than a horizontal company would be in the industry. It's not to say that companies are gonna experiment, or try, or do different things, but it's, they're two different things. We're focused on something different.
Yeah, no, that's really great perspective, and I have a bunch more questions off of that, but we have gone through the fastest 40 minutes, I feel like, ever. So we have to cut... We're gonna get cut off here in a second or two, but, so we'll stop there. Brent, Paul, thank you so much for joining me. It was a really fun conversation. Thanks to everyone who joined in on the webcast as well, but we'll leave it there, and hope that everyone has a great rest of their day and a great weekend.
Great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks everyone for joining.