Awesome. Thank you everybody for joining today. My name is Dylan Becker. I'm the Research Analyst here at William Blair, that covers Veeva Systems. For all the necessary disclosures, you can find those on williamblair.com. Today, we have, the Executive Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Paul Shawah. Paul, thank you for taking the time.
Thanks for having us.
I think a lot of people here are probably familiar with the Veeva story in some capacity, but for those that aren't, maybe can you help us level set the backdrop of what you guys are kinda trying to solve for the life sciences industry?
Yeah. So, first, thanks, all, for coming. It's great to be here with everyone. So we talk about building the Industry Cloud for life sciences, which is software and data and business consulting for the life sciences industry, all kind of working together. We're designing them to be interoperable, the software systems, the data assets that they purchase, and then also the consulting that they need to kind of change and transform their business. So that's what we're building, the Industry Cloud. We're trying to make the life sciences industry more efficient in terms of how they develop drugs and how they commercialize those, how they bring those to market and get them ultimately to the right doctors and into the hands of the right patients that need them, and that's what our software does.
It's designed to address some of the most mission-critical systems that they have, whether it's the clinical drug development, the clinical operations, how they submit all of their data to the regulatory authorities, and then the commercialization of those medicines.
It's been a success story along the way, right, Paul? The business has evolved over the years, but can you give us a sense of where we sit today? Financial profile, profitability profile, customer types that you serve.
Yeah, so, we have. We're somewhat unique in what we do in serving the industry because we do bring all of these pieces together. The industry has been served, by and large, by niche vendors that support one or two areas, and we're supporting a broad area. And we do that, bringing consistency across the kind of platforms that we bring. So we have something called Vault Platform, where we develop and deliver many applications on top of. What we have created is a durable growth business. So we've grown profitably, really since day one. Our operating model has been about generating revenue, but doing it in a very profitable way. We're growing into a very large market opportunity.
So we talk about our total addressable market as being about $20 billion, about 1% of the overall spend of the end market that we serve, so a $2 trillion healthy and growing life sciences industry, and we think we can capture about 1% of that overall spend, and we're growing into that, and we're on track. We've talked about our 2025 targets to be $3 billion, and we're on track to hit those, hit those growth targets. So we've grown since 2007 profitably and on track to continue to grow for the long term. We're about 15% penetrated into our overall market, so a lot of growth ahead.
What does a typical customer look like for you, right? And as you think about the complexity of all of these different systems, and we'll get into kind of the platform components as well, what's kind of the common theme that's driving maybe some of the broader standardization efforts or driving digital investment?
Yeah, so a typical customer is a life sciences company, and it's from the very largest to the very smallest life sciences company. We serve the global life sciences industry. Over 90% of our revenue comes from life sciences. And then in terms of a typical customer, they're- it really spans, we can help them modernize their systems. These are the core systems of record that they use for everything from, like I was talking about earlier, clinical, managing quality processes and manufacturing processes in the company-
H ow they get their drugs approved through the regulatory authorities. So it's their mission-critical systems that we enable, and part of what we're doing for the industry is we're helping them modernize. What we're replacing is, to this day, is still a lot of on-premise systems and technologies and disparate systems from lots of different vendors, and we're helping them clean up and harmonize and modernize their systems. So the more they modernize, the more they have an ability to become more digital, become more efficient. This is about kind of transforming and modernizing their their most important systems.
Sure. Sure. And maybe going back to-
T he core roots of the business, starting in pharmaceutical CRM, obviously, a lot of evolution that's gone on in that product, and you've gained a notable share. But how should we think about where you started in CRM, and how that's kind of contributed to the evolution over time?
Yeah, so, yeah, we did start in one market. So the way to think about the business today is it's 10 major product areas, and CRM is one of those 10 major product areas, and there are five major product areas on the commercial side and five major product areas on the R&D side. So, commercial, CRM used to be one of only one, and now it's one of 10, to give you a perspective as to the breadth of the kinds of things that we're solving for life sciences companies. That was a great market for us. We're able to establish market share leadership. We have over 80% share in the CRM space. When we do enter a market, we do invest with the anticipation of becoming the market leader over time.
We, in many of our markets, we have a structural advantage, that being, I referenced this earlier, the Vault Platform, a common platform where all of our applications are built on top of. So a pharma company gets leverage when they choose to use two or three or four or more of our applications, there's a benefit because they're all built on the same platform. They get leverage, and they get additional value. So CRM was the foundation. It was the starting point. It allowed us a place to grow and establish a growth profitable business, and then build additional applications that were interconnected into that. And we did that on the commercial side, and then we started that same pattern in R&D.
We entered R&D well after the commercial timing, but now we're going through that same pattern of establishing core systems and then expanding with suites of applications.
Sure. And it, it certainly established that kind of strategic partner to the ecosystem relationship. But before we get to the R&D side, you did announce the transition of CRM or over to your internal Vault Platform over time.
I think that was about 12 months, 18 months or so ago that that was announced.
That's right.
Can you give us an update on kind of the rationale behind doing that and where we are? I think there's three of the top twenty customers that have said, "Hey, we're, we're committed to moving forward with Vault." How should we think about what that, that transition phase looks like?
Yeah, so it's interesting. I referenced Vault Platform. Ironically, we started the company with CRM built on a third-party platform, on the Salesforce platform, which ultimately became the market share leader in the market. So a very successful product, very successful market introduction, but we didn't have control over everything. We didn't have control over everything that we could build on top of that core platform. Some things we were restricted from, from either a technology or a contractual standpoint. And for us to innovate, for us to unlock innovation, we knew that we had to move to our own platform, and that's exactly what it did. We made the decision, like you said, just about 18 months ago. We announced that we were moving to the Vault Platform. It's a replatform, it's a major effort.
Our customers did not ask us to do this, but we're thinking for the long term here, and we're thinking about future innovation. So the precise reason is so that we can innovate, so that we can bring new capabilities to the market. Since we made that announcement about 18 months ago, we've announced three major new product areas that we're going into in the commercial space. So those are just examples of the kinds of innovation that we can bring in the marketing space, in the call center space, in the patient engagement and patient services space. We have three new offerings that we would not have been able to deliver before on. So this is about innovation.
It's about control and being able to do what, what our customers are asking us for in terms of bringing new products into the market.
Sure, sure. And last one on commercial, I think the last big component of the commercial suite today, is the initiatives you guys are making on the data side-
T he Data Cloud business.
How should we think about kind of your expansion into data as a differentiation versus what's kinda currently available in the market, and maybe the uniqueness of being able to close the loop from a marketing perspective, and, and pairing that, prescription data with the sales data and the marketing data, more holistically?
Yeah. So we entered the data business. At first, I guess maybe let me state that the problem we solved on the software side of our customers was that it was a highly fragmented market across many, many different areas, lots of different vendors, with lots of different systems that they needed to stitch together, and that's the problem that we solved in software. The data side of the house had the same exact. It looked the same way. It was highly fragmented from data vendors that really hadn't innovated in a long time. In one part of the business, there was one kind of dominant data provider who's been selling data into the industry for the last 30 years. Data is really critical for the life sciences companies.
Every company buys third-party data, but there hasn't been a whole lot of innovation there. So our strategy was to be able to do data in a very different way, to be able to deliver data that we create using technology. So we're taking a very different approach. The old way is kind of, you know, buying data assets and trying to stitch them together, and doing that in a very manual, bespoke way. We're using technology to do that process, which allows us to create a more accurate data set, and to be able to deliver that data set faster to our customers. We talk about things like daily data, literally meaning we can provide visibility to a pharma company of something that happened yesterday in the office around a patient.
So it's providing visibility of patient activity, healthcare provider behaviors. These are the kinds of things that we can provide visibility to in our data. The life sciences industry uses them for things like targeting and segmenting their customers and finding new patients, but then also incentive compensation, how they pay their sales reps. Based on this data, you can see how mission-critical this is. So we're doing data in a very different way. It's essential to the industry.
We're on the beginning part of this journey, but we're disrupting the traditional players in the, in the data space, and this is it's a super exciting growth area 'cause it's a very large market, and we're set up to, to innovate it, innovate in that market, do it in a different way, and then also integrate our data into our software, because the data is only useful if you, if you can use it and action on it in software. And that's the Industry Cloud. Great software working together, great data working together, and the software and the data combined creating a new level of value for, for our customers.
Sure, sure. So we've covered half, effectively, of the business today on the commercial side. Maybe if we switch over to the R&D side, how you thought of that as a natural extension relative to where you started in commercial, and how that platform has evolved, and obviously, how you're thinking about the opportunity on R&D?
Yeah, you're right. We started in commercial with CRM, and then, we realized that the same kinds of problems we were solving in commercial, modernizing, becoming more digital, those same kinds of problems, and challenges existed on the R&D side of a life sciences company. Highly fragmented, legacy technology, multiple niche vendors, our strategy was to try to clean that up with a single platform, and that's what we've done in R&D. We started with, back in the day, in probably 2010 or 2011, with one product in R&D. It was in the clinical operations space, and now we have 20 or 30+ products in R&D alone. So we have a number of products all working together in five major categories.
The operational side of a clinical trial, the data capture side, quality, regulatory, safety. Those are the five main pillars, where we have a number of suites of applications. So we're cleaning up a fragmented market. Now, our operating model is one where we continue to innovate and deliver new products to the market. So we have some products that are more established. They've been in market for a number of years, and they're more penetrated, and they're contributing more. And then we have other products which were introduced over the last couple of years and that are just getting started and new. So a core part of our operating model is to continue to innovate, continue to introduce new products, and create a long-term, durable growth business.
And we've seen that play out historically, and it's setting us up to continue to grow for years to come.
Sure, sure. Yeah, it's very clear that innovation is at the core of kind of Veeva's DNA. As we think about each of those kind of components of the R&D suite and where they sit relative to the overall maturity curve, can you talk about, again, the value of the integration and the connectivity of each of those, and maybe how some of the success you've seen in the more mature offerings is driving familiarity, willingness, and customer adoption on some of the earlier-stage components?
Yeah, so the connectivity of all of these applications is super important to a customer. I don't wanna under-sell and underplay that. But I would say, first and foremost, even before you get to that point, the applications are often bought by a single buyer, and our strategy is to make the application the very best it can possibly be for that buyer. We want the buyer to make a decision 'cause it's the best application on the marketplace, and then on top of that, we want them to get additional value because they're all integrated, and they all work seamlessly together. So, getting them to start someplace, somewhere, with a great product, recognizing the value, and then being able to expand and achieve, you know, additional interoperability, additional connectivity, 'cause all of these functions are related to each other. They all work with each other.
What you do in the regulatory side impacts what happens on the clinical side, and vice versa, so they need to talk to each other. We're creating great applications that all work together. There is this additional benefit of when you have success in one part of the market, it spills over. It creates greater opportunity for you in other parts of the market.
Sure. Sure, and maybe the last piece within that as well-
As the business consulting side that you talked about. There's a lot of process management associated with that. As you think about kind of digitizing these workflows, can you talk about how strategic that business consulting arm is for you, and maybe how that helps unlock new opportunities for innovation and new products that you bring to market?
Yeah, business consulting was a business we started about five years ago. It is the, it's the third leg of the stool: software, data, and business consulting. Why is it so important? It's important because if you have better technology, if you have better data, that's allows you to move faster and to be more agile. Business consulting is the third piece that allows you to change and transform. It's about your operating model and your business process, processes and all of the change management associated with that. So this is truly becoming that strategic partner. Our business consulting team, they're industry experts. They know how the industry operates, but they're also experts in our software.
They understand the technology, the art of the possible, and it's about bringing those two things together, knowing how the industry works, but knowing what it could operate, how it could operate, and what it could look like. And that's what's unique. They provide very pragmatic advice and guidance to our customers. That's real and enabled by the technology that we provide. So it's become super important. It does influence, to your point, it does influence our. It creates a more intimate relationship with our customers, 'cause these are people that are on the ground and talking to the business and interacting with the business day in and day out, so we do learn.
We the business consulting organization influences our strategy, and it influences our product direction, and we have very direct features and functions that come out of the business consulting organization that we adopt. We see patterns across companies, and we're able to address those patterns and productize them. So it's been really valuable to our customers, but also to Veeva as a whole. It's the, it is that third part of the stool.
Sure. And it sounds like, kind of wrapping that all up, too, there's a lot of opportunity across multiple different vectors of the business. How should we think about the differentiation or the uniqueness of your ability to offer all of those, versus maybe what might be viewed as more point solutions? What's the competitive landscape look like, and how much does that kind of standardized platform provide differentiated capabilities?
Yeah. So the way to think about the competitive landscape, I talked about the, I said 30+ products that we have as an example. We have 30 major product areas across 10 big categories. Our competitors are generally different in each of those 10 areas. The competitors, they may compete in one area. They may develop one or two applications, maybe three. We're developing 30 that span across all of those different areas. So the benefits are really twofold, from both a business perspective and a technology perspective. If you're the CIO, the global CIO of a pharma company, you want a single platform, a single strategic partner that you can rely on. You want somebody who's gonna clean up a lot of the vendor complexity, the technology complexity, the interoperability.
So it creates a significant technology advantage, but it also creates a business advantage, and that business advantage is those different functions, they work together. They need to connect, they need to talk to each other, and if they're all on disparate systems and different vendors, it's hard for them to talk to each other. So we solve the business side of the problem. We help the business become more agile. We provide new capabilities because of this common platform.
Sure, sure. And maybe to get a bit more granular, you guys did report earnings last week, right? There's still some nuances across the broader macro environment that you guys are seeing. Obviously, these are strategic decisions, but they also take time. Is there a way to kind of level set what you're seeing and hearing from customers, and how they're actually thinking about decisioning in the current environment?
Yeah. So, I guess a couple of things. I guess in the short term t here's a short term and a long term. In the short term, there has been some noise. I think you've kind of seen this across technology, but also across other industries. The macro environment has been a little bit challenging. That has created a little bit of additional scrutiny on deals, shifted deal timing in the SMB segment. Things like interest rates have increased and, when they were expected to kind of decrease over time, so that's created a little bit more uncertainty in the SMB space. So there's a little bit of noise in the system as a result of some of these near-term changes. The reality is the longer-term view hasn't changed.
The demand environment is identical. These are mission-critical systems, core capabilities that they will need to modernize. So this is about a shift in time rather than it is a replacement or not doing these kinds of projects. So that's one similar demand environment. And then also the competitive, from a competitive landscape standpoint, we actually get stronger over time. The more products we're able to introduce and the market adopts, because of that structural advantage that I talked about earlier, the more valuable they become, the wider the competitive moat becomes between us and having a new entrant come into the market or an existing player. So the demand environment's there, the competitive environment is as strong as it's ever been. So we feel good about the long term.
It's just really that, this near term, the choppiness, and that will play through the system. It'll play through over time, and we feel good about where things are headed.
Right. Right. And maybe the focal point there being that there is such a long-term opportunity and massive market ahead for you guys. I know we're tracking towards kind of the $3 billion run rate targets here in calendar 2025, but what's the right way of thinking about where the business could trend over the next kind of five, 10+ years? What's the right way of thinking about the opportunity you called out, 15% penetration in the TAM, but how durable is this growth run rate, or can this growth runway be?
Yeah. So we do serve a very large end market. It's a healthy end market. It's a $2 trillion market. I think we referenced that, and we see our overall ability to capture about 1% of that overall market, which is so it gives us a $20 billion TAM. The majority of which we have existing products for today, and we do expect to be the market share leader in those products for all the reasons that I talked about. So you can kind of see a very long-term, durable growth path because of the overall size of the opportunity, the execution that we have, we've been able to execute well against the vast majority of these markets. Now, they all play out at different paces, right?
Each market is slightly different than the other. Some go a little bit faster, some not as fast, but we think we're headed to the same place. So, yeah, we have a lot of runway. We're about, like you said, 15% penetrated. Some of our largest markets are in front of us. One example is our EDC market, which is the clinical data management space. It's our largest single opportunity, and we're very early days. We're certainly well less than 15% penetrated in that market.
Sure. And maybe it's a good, good to highlight as well within the EDC segment, because you have been seeing a lot of momentum in that business, but it's also one that kind of ramps and takes time for that to actually flow through to revenue. Can you talk about what's driving the demand environment there and how you monetize within a handful of these solutions as well? Is that a trial-based solution? Is it more kind of an enterprise type of agreement? How should we think about the EDC side?
Yeah, so as you probably all know, that anybody that covers the industry or knows anything about the industry, the lifeblood of the pharma company is the drug development process. The speed at which they can get their clinical trials run, so they can generate the data to get the drug through the approval process. And every day they shave off of doing that is super valuable, especially if it's the potential for a blockbuster drug, 'cause these are $10s or $100s of millions that they can create by shaving days and weeks off the clinical trials process. So our EDC helps companies do that as efficiently as possible. We have established, because our technology is better, it's modern, started later than the existing players in the marketplace.
It started cloud-first and cloud-native, and we architected it for some of the biggest challenges that the industry had. Getting the trial started, handling changes that happen within the trial, bringing together all of the data, 'cause there's the data capture, and then other systems that have data that need to be submitted. Bringing all those data sources together in a very clean and efficient way. So we're innovating in core areas of the data capture process, and that's what's driving the demand. So we, over the last couple of years, we've gone from just entering the market, we now have eight of top 20 pharma companies committed to running all their trials on our EDC product. So we're at the beginning, we're making progress there, but to your point, the way these products are...
The way the agreements are structured in the enterprise, so think companies like top 20, is they ramp up over a period of time. It may be four years, three or four or five years, where they get to a steady state value. So we see some revenue in year one, and but we may see more in year two and three and beyond. That's the pattern, so after we announce one of these, it takes. It could take a number of years before that full revenue is recognized. But the market momentum is there. We're seeing the industry start to make that transition, which is super exciting. And it's a good indicator of, you know, I think we'll be the market share leader in that market over time.
Sure, sure. Maybe switching to a recent product announcement to the Vault Basics solution and what you're thinking about there for maybe smaller, preclinical or early-stage kind of b iotech startups.
Mm-hmm
Standardizing processes, can you give us kind of a backdrop on, on the rationale and the thought process on what you can digitize there?
Yeah. This was an exciting one. So Vault Basics is taking our Vault products, and we're starting in a couple of very specific areas in R&D, and it's providing them to companies that are under 200 employees that they need, they fundamentally need the same great technology that all the big top 20 pharma companies use, but they didn't have access to before, 'cause they couldn't afford to do the implementations, and they couldn't afford to run and operate them. We're providing those products in a standard way, where there is no implementation. There's literally no services work, and there's no way to configure. It's just a standard product. So it's truly packaged software, where we run it, we operate it for them, and essentially, their cost is the license cost, and it gets them started. So it gives them...
For them, it's a great advantage, 'cause it gives them access to the very best software and technology, so they can run and operate their company. And for us, it gets them started on the path to growing into something much bigger and expanding. And we provide a very clear path to kind of, in a sense, turn on the full Vault capabilities when they need access to them. So it's a good thing we do. We're excited that we're able to help those companies. We're excited that we've created and unlocked a new market opportunity inside of our installed base. So it feels good, and this will influence our product.
This is, it all fits into our broader strategy to help advance the industry, and this is one step forward in advancing how the industry gets access to technology, and it will influence our product direction going forward, creating things that are more standard.
Sure, sure. So we've covered a lot today. Maybe you're a bit biased to the commercial side, but as we think about what the next decade looks like for Veeva, what excites you the most? There's a lot of things going on, but what excites you?
Yeah, so there is a lot. You know, we are a multi-product company, so I've referenced that a number of times. So the idea of being multi-product, even well beyond what we do in commercial, is super exciting, and I would say, if you want to kind of zero in on some specific opportunities, I'm really excited about what we're doing in clinical. Again, it is the lifeblood of the life sciences company, and we are in a unique position to transform and change how life sciences companies run and operate and execute their clinical trials.
Not only from the software and the technology that the life sciences company uses, but also how they interact with their ecosystem, their partners, the clinical research organizations, but also the clinical research sites and the investigators, and ultimately, the patients. The patients are obviously a key part of the clinical trial, and our strategy is to unify all of these pieces together, to give them access to great technology, to simplify the flow of data, to make the clinical trials process less expensive, much more efficient. So if I had to pick one area, it's this overall clinical space, because the impact we can have on the industry, the overall opportunity there. If you give me a chance to pick a second one, I'll probably pick our data business.
We're transforming the data like we did on the software side, and we're just in that early stage, right? We're just getting started in data, and it has all of the hallmarks of what we have done and what we've been able to accomplish on the software side. Just, it's earlier in the lifecycle. So I gave you two for one there.
Appreciate it. That was fantastic. Thank you all for listening in. Paul, thank you for joining. We will continue the breakout session in the Maher room upstairs, so look forward to you joining us up there. Thank you.
Thanks.