Veeva Systems Inc. (VEEV)
NYSE: VEEV · Real-Time Price · USD
160.45
-0.68 (-0.42%)
At close: Apr 27, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT
160.45
0.00 (0.00%)
After-hours: Apr 27, 2026, 6:30 PM EDT
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: Q2 2020

Aug 27, 2019

Speaker 1

Good afternoon. My name is Chantal, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Veeva's Fiscal 20 22nd Quarter Results Thank you. Rick Lund, Investor Relations Director, you may begin your conference.

Speaker 2

Good afternoon, and welcome to Veeva's fiscal 2020 Q2 earnings call for the quarter ended July 31, 2019. With me on today's call are Peter Gassner, our Chief Executive Officer Paul Schowa, SVP of Commercial Cloud and Tim Cabral, our Chief Financial Officer. During the course of this conference call, we will make forward looking statements regarding trends, our strategies and the anticipated performance of the business. These forward looking statements will be based on management's current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially.

Please refer to the risks listed in our earnings release and the risk factors included in our most recent filing on Form 10 Q, which is available on the company's website at www.viva.com under the Investors section and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Forward looking statements made during the call are being made as of today, August 27, 2019. If this call is replayed or viewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Veeva disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward looking statements. We will provide guidance on today's call, but we'll not provide any further guidance or updates on our performance during the quarter unless we do so in a public forum.

On the call, we will also discuss certain non GAAP metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation to comparable GAAP metrics can be found in today's earnings release, which is available on our website and as an exhibit to the Form 8 ks filed with the SEC just before this call. Finally, I'd like to welcome you to join us at our Annual Analyst and Investor Day October 2 in San Francisco. If you haven't received an invite and would like to attend, please feel free to reach out via email at the address irviva.com. If you can't join in person, the event will be webcast with both the live and archived versions available on our Investor Relations website.

And with that, thank you for joining us. And I will turn it over to Peter.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Rick, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Q2 was another strong quarter with results above our guidance. Total revenue was 267,000,000 dollars up 27% year over year. Subscription revenue grew 28% year over year and our non GAAP operating margin was 39%. Veeva has now passed $1,000,000,000 revenue run rate.

This is 1.5 years ahead of the target we first laid out in 2015. With customer success as our driving force, we were able to exceed our goals through exceptional focus and execution. Thank you and congratulations to the Veeva team. Today, we also announced our CFO, Tim Cabral, is retiring next year after a 30 year career and 10 years at Veeva. A search for his replacement is underway, and Tim is staying at Veeva through the hiring and onboarding of our new CFO to ensure a smooth transition.

I'd like to express our appreciation and thanks to Tim. He's an exceptional leader, having helped guide Veeva from a start up to our current scale. He also built a strong team. Working with Tim at Veeva and at PeopleSoft before that has been a true partnership that I value deeply. Now turning to the details of the quarter.

Strong momentum in Commercial Cloud contributed to our outperformance in Q2. In core CRM, we continue to extend our leadership position with new SMB customers and additional enterprise expansions. And customers continue to adopt more CRM add ons. This happens on a product by product and region by region basis. Let me give a couple of examples.

CEVA CRM Engage had one of its strongest quarters as 4 top twenty pharmas expanded their use of Engage to new field teams. Customers are attracted by the deep functionality and multi platform support of Engage and the very tight integration with CRM. We also had an important design win at the Top 20 Pharma for Events Management. This customer has been using core CRM globally for many years and recently decided to expand their Veeva relationship to include events management in more than 90 countries over time. They chose Veeva because we have a deep functionality and professional services capabilities needed for a global events management rollout.

They will replace multiple custom systems and spreadsheets leading to a more efficient and compliant global process. It's great to see this expanding relationship with a long standing customer. Turning to Vault. We continue to have great momentum. Vault now has nearly 6 50 customers and as of Q2 represents more than 50% of total revenue.

This is an exciting milestone. When we started Vault a number of years ago, the potential was clear to me. And as I look ahead, it's also clear that we're in the early days of Vault. This quarter, a newly independent top 20 medical device company standardized on Vault across the organization, including clinical, quality, regulatory and commercial. With the ability to start from a clean slate, they chose Vault because it's the only solution to provide best in class application suites on a single modern cloud platform.

Our customer success focus and commitment to the medical device industry was also key. In clinical, they will use Veeva eTMF, CTMS and CDMS. Let's focus in on CDMS. They chose Veeva CDMS over their incumbent system for a few reasons. First, they were looking toward the future and long term partnership, so they liked our pace of innovation.

They have seen VIVUS CDMS evolve rapidly over the past 12 months and are excited about what's ahead. They also saw that VIVUS CDMS is well suited to running all their types of studies. It can handle the complex studies, but also it's practical to use for small studies that are built on short notice. And they also won clinical data management and clinical operations, all on a common platform to gain operational efficiency. We now have a top 20 pharma and a top 20 med device company as Lighthouse customers for CDMS.

These early adopter accounts are very important and their success is a major for the team. CTMS is also progressing well. We continue to win more deals and now have 50 customers signed in just 2 years since the product was released. That's amazing momentum in a highly complex area. Our progress here speaks to the significant need in the market for a modern CTMS solution.

We believe Vault CTMS is poised to be the leading solution over time. Drilling down into quality, we signed our 10th top 20 pharma for Vault Quality Docs. Following their success with Vault PromoMats, eTMF and submissions, this customer selected QualityDocs as part of their move away from a legacy content management platform. On the QMS side of quality, we ended the quarter with more than 100 customers. The need for modernization is driving the move to Veeva in this area as is the benefit of having QMS integrated with quality docs and training on the Vault platform.

This is another great example of the innovation we are bringing to an underserved market. Finally, I'd like to give an update on our efforts outside of Life Sciences. I'm pleased with the progress we're making within our 3 focus industries: CPG, chemicals and cosmetics. Since announcing the new Vault claims product last quarter, we now have projects in place at 3 top CPG companies. We are also executing well in chemicals and cosmetics.

Customer success drives our business in all industries. This quarter, we had major go lives at a top 20 CPG, a top 20 cosmetics company and 2 major go lives in chemical. In closing, we had a great quarter. Our results reflect the customer trust we have gained through consistent innovation, focused execution and our commitment to their success. With that, I'll turn it over to Tim.

Speaker 4

Thanks, Peter. Q2 was another quarter of solid execution across the board. Total revenue was $267,000,000 up from $210,000,000 1 year ago, a 27% increase. Momentum across Vault continues with Vault now representing 52% of total revenue, up from 46% in Q2 of last year. Subscription revenue grew 28% to $217,000,000 from $170,000,000 last year.

Vault represented 48 percent of subscription revenue, up from 42% a year ago. Year over year growth benefited from particularly strong bookings in the first half of the year and from 190 basis points of tailwind from 606 due to the recognition of unbilled revenue from multi year orders with ramping fees. Services revenue was nearly $50,000,000 up 24% from $40,000,000 1 year ago. We expect services revenue to be roughly flat sequentially in Q3. We continue to see strong profitability in Q2.

Non GAAP operating income came in about $104,000,000 a 39% operating margin above the high end of our guidance. This was primarily driven by outperformance on the top line. We made good progress investing in the business with a record hiring quarter. Approximately 100 and 80 net new employees joined Veeva in Q2, bringing our total headcount to from 2,376 1 year ago. Moving to the balance sheet, deferred revenue was $329,000,000 compared to $364,000,000 at the end of Q1.

This resulted in calculated billings for the quarter of $234,000,000 which was ahead of our guidance of $220,000,000 This was a function of a strong bookings quarter, outperformance in services revenue and better than expected billing duration for the new business closed in Q2. Please remember that there are numerous factors that make year over year comparisons of this metric highly variable on a quarterly basis. Therefore, we do not believe it is a good indicator of the underlying momentum of our business and we do not manage to it internally. Our subscription revenue guidance and calculated billings guidance for the full fiscal year are the best indicators of our momentum. Looking ahead, we expect calculated billings of roughly $185,000,000 in Q3 and roughly $1,135,000,000 for the full year, which is a $15,000,000 increase from the high end of our guidance provided last quarter.

Elsewhere on the balance sheet, we exited Q2 with over $1,400,000,000 in cash and short term investments, up from over $1,300,000,000 at the end of Q1. This increase was driven by our performance in cash from operations, which came in at $100,000,000 and included $17,000,000 in excess tax benefit related to equity compensation. For the full year, we now expect cash from operations to be $345,000,000 to $350,000,000 excluding this excess tax benefit. Let me conclude by sharing the outlook for Q3 and for fiscal 2020. Next quarter, we expect revenue between $274,000,000 to $275,000,000 non GAAP operating income of $103,000,000 to $104,000,000 and non GAAP net income per share of $0.54 to $0.55 based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 159,000,000.

For the year, we expect revenue in the range of $1,062,000,000 to $1,065,000,000 We expect subscription revenue to be in the range of $871,000,000 to $874,000,000 And within that, we now anticipate commercial cloud subscription revenue growth between 13% to 14% and Vault subscription revenue growth of at least 40%. For fiscal 2020, we expect non GAAP operating income of $401,000,000 to $404,000,000 a margin of about 38%, roughly a 100 basis point increase from our previous guidance. Coming off of a record hiring quarter, we plan to continue investing for customer success and future growth with an aggressive hiring plan for the remainder of the year. We are now targeting non net income per share for the year between $2.11 $2.13 based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 159,000,000. Before I wrap up, I'd like to share some additional thoughts on my retirement.

As Peter mentioned, we've kicked off the search for my replacement and I will be here through the full onboarding. As I retire from an incredibly rewarding 30 years in technology, my tenures at Veeva have been the most fulfilling of my career. It has been a privilege to be part of such a talented team and a truly great company. The impact Veeva is having on our customers and the industry is remarkable. This is evident in our quarter's results and our outlook for the back half of the year.

The opportunity ahead, along with the team's thank you for joining the call. And I will now turn it back to the operator for questions.

Speaker 1

Your first question comes from Bhavan Suri with William Blair. Your line is open.

Speaker 5

Hey, guys. This is actually Dylan Becker on for Bhavan. I guess I just kind of wanted to start off around Nitro and Andi adoption. What are you guys necessarily hearing from customers and how is the implementation process gone? It looks like you're now projecting cloud growth of 13% to 14% for the year.

How much of this is kind of attributable to the Nitro and Andi adoption?

Speaker 6

Yes. Hey, Dylan, this is Paul. Thanks for the question. So with regards to Nitro, we added some additional customers this quarter. Last quarter, we talked a lot about some of the early customers that we had who were on stage at our big summit event and they were talking about their implementation.

Now they've been live for a period of time and that's going extremely well. So the product is certainly working in the early market. I would say we're feeling a little bit of headwind from some of the anti competitive behavior from IQVIA. So some of the same behavior that they've demonstrated with network, they're also demonstrating with Nitro. So we have to balance some of the success that we're seeing with these early adopters with some of the headwind that we're seeing as well.

I would say with Andy, we're focused on getting the product to the right level of maturity and also getting some of those early customers kind of signed up and live. This is still early market early days really for both Nitro and for Andi. So from a contribution standpoint, it's going to take some time before their material and meaningful impact from a contribution perspective.

Speaker 5

Okay. Yes, great. Thank you. And then I guess kind of just in general as you look at the geopolitical environment around drug pricing and regulation, can you kind of remind us, does this have any effect around your guys' go to market here? And then are you seeing I mean, what are you seeing and hearing from customers around this as well?

Thank you.

Speaker 6

Yes. Thanks for the follow-up. So it certainly has the potential to have an impact on how we go to market and also more importantly the types of relationships that pharma companies have with their suppliers. We haven't seen any of that yet. Drug pricing is has the potential to have a very significant impact across the industry.

It would affect all suppliers, Veeva being some of the same in that same grouping. What I would say is, we haven't seen any impact yet. I'd also say that as they have more pricing pressure and as they have more cost pressure, the balancing side of that that may create a tailwind is the fact that companies often look to technology to try to drive efficiency. So I think there's a little bit of a potential headwind, but there's also some opportunity for technology to drive efficiency and cost savings as well.

Speaker 5

Okay, great. Yes, thank you guys for taking my questions and congrats again on the quarter.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Brad Sills with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks guys for taking my question. Just one on CDMS. Obviously, you're seeing traction there in the top 20 segment of the market. I know you've been working on features as you're kind of moving up with reference building there.

Are there any features in particular you'd point to, to say, well, now CDMS is ready for these top 20s and maybe we're hitting a tipping point?

Speaker 3

Good question, Brad. This is Peter. In terms of features, you can always add more features, that's for sure. Software is never done. But we're pretty well feature complete now, I would say.

Of course, features need to be rounded out over the years. So what people would look for now is just proven success and some are going to want to be more early adopter ish than others. So I think we're in the normal technology adoption life cycle. And this is a critical area for life sciences. So it's not something that they're going to switch out easily, right, or without thought.

So we're doing well in features. And in fact, in some cases, we're really getting out ahead of things, because we're taking a fresh approach. And since you asked about a product, I'm going to give you a detailed product answer because I like that stuff. When clinical data management started, many years ago, electronic clinical data management started, it was about collecting data points of the patient. Now as medicines and therapies have become more complex, it's becoming more important to collect qualitative medical assessments from physicians, from 3rd party physicians who are assessing the data points.

That's been an afterthought in medical device in CDMS systems for many years. And because there was no innovation in the market, that just persisted. Now when Veeva comes out, we actually put excellent features in for that. And so in some cases, in some feature areas, we're actually taking a fresh approach and leapfrogging the market and this medical assessment is one of those areas.

Speaker 7

That's great. And then one more if I may please just on commercial, you obviously raised the outlook for this year. Where would you point to in particular on the outperformance? It sounds like you've got a new customer win there, but also you're executing well on some of these add on attaches more company wide. Any color you can provide on that please?

Thank you. Yes.

Speaker 6

Hi, this is Paul. I'll take that one. So the outperformance in commercial is driven by a couple of factors. First CRM, we're seeing our enterprise customers expand into their regions faster than expected. So that expansion is continuing

Speaker 4

to happen and

Speaker 6

we'll continue to see a bit more of that in the enterprise side. We're also seeing strength in small and medium sized companies. So these think companies that are pre commercial, a lot of the net new wins here are pre commercial companies and they're launching their first product. What they want to do is they want to launch and have the most successful launch based on modern technology. So we see a lot of success there.

And the other trend that's happening there is they often go in with Veeva CRM and a number of the add ons in the initial purchase. So we see that that is a bit of a trend that's continuing. So some of the add ons, so CRM has strength. I would also point to a few of the add ons that are kind of outperforming what we'd expected. So Engage is one area where a number of enterprise customers have began global expansions on Engage.

Will take time, that will happen over months, if not years. But we're seeing that trend continue where they're able to demonstrate results and build out that business case. And we've also seen great performance better than expected with approved email and also for open data. And I think what's driving that is the industry trying to move to digital a bit faster as well. So we're seeing strength in both in CRM and the add ons.

Speaker 7

Great. Thank you so much. Tim, congratulations on your move. You'll be missed.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Brad.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Sandy Draper with SunTrust. Your line is open.

Speaker 8

Thanks very much for taking my question. I guess my question is going back to the hiring side. Tim, I think you commented you had maybe the most hires of any quarter. I think I may have heard that correctly. Just trying to get a sense of how what's driving that and how much wage inflation is there?

And are you competing against other players around the life sciences area? Or is it really more competing against tech people a little bit of both? Just trying to get a sense of if you guys keep growing and selling as well on the top line, how hard is it going to be to hire to support that demand? Thanks.

Speaker 4

Yes, Sandy, this is Tim. Thanks for the question. And Peter, I don't know if you want to add anything here on the hiring side of what we're seeing. I think a couple of things have contributed to what was our strongest hiring quarter to date. You identified that correctly, Sandy.

Number 1, we have a very strong university hiring program, we call Generation Viva. And as you can imagine, typically you'll see in Q2 and sometimes it spills a little bit into Q3, but mostly in Q2 is when we're hiring a lot of folks into that program, both on the engineering side and the consulting side. And that has been a focus of ours over the last couple of years as our thesis is, we really want to continue to grow industry cloud expertise, and we can do that from the university folks as they grow in the company here at Veeva. Secondly, and this may get to your wage inflation question as well, Sandy, Well, we've done a very nice job, I think, is we've opened up new hiring markets for us or focused more of our energy on newer hiring markets. So obviously Pleasanton and the Greater Bay Area is a very strong market for us and we continue to focus here.

But we've also over the last couple of years really focused on Toronto and Columbus as other areas where we're finding both products people, some customer service people and some back office people as well. So I think the expanding the number of markets we can hire from has also helped in our execution around hiring. Peter, I don't know if you had any additional color there.

Speaker 3

Tim summed it up well. It's about expanding locations. You have to do that. And then in terms of competition, it it depends on the segment, whether it's fresh out of college, okay, that's tech companies and consulting companies. In engineering, you're competing against tech companies in the field for general sales positions.

You may compete against all tech companies. And then in some of our domain specific areas like strategy, yes, they were competing against other life sciences specific companies. So it's always the same, right? You have to compete to feel the best team, that's where you get the best company.

Speaker 8

Great. That's really helpful. Thanks and congrats on another great quarter.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Thanks, Andy.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Thanks very much. Peter, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the outside life sciences or the OLS business just in terms of referenceability and kind of where you are there what your thoughts might be around sort of upping the sales motion if you are getting closer to referenceability? Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. We're happy with our progress outside of life sciences. It's still early days. So our concentration really now is in some of these large customers we have, rounding out the products. We are getting more referenceable over the time and you won't see a hockey stick type of effect, but more of an even acceleration of the market and that's what we're seeing.

Speaker 9

Okay. That's helpful. And Tim, maybe just on your 606 comments. Is there anything left on that front in terms of sort of ramped deals that we should be thinking about, I guess, exiting this year and into next year?

Speaker 4

Yes, Kirk, thanks for the question. In terms of 606 as you know, we get a little bit of a revenue uptick given the new revenue guidance around unbilled revenue of multi year deals that have ramping fees and that are non cancelable. So really at the end of the day, it boils down to the mix of those types of deals. And there are a number of we're in the early days of Vault, which is where we see these. And so there's certainly an opportunity where those types of deals and or the mix of those deals either continues in a steady way or grows or contracts.

So it's not something we specifically forecast. And as I think I said last quarter, I'll say it again here, as we see the actual impact of that be material to the results, as I've done in the last two quarters, I'll make sure I give that transparency and color. We think about it internally sort of like FX in that way. When it's material, companies like us will talk about it.

Speaker 9

Super. Thanks very much. And Tim, congrats on a great run.

Speaker 4

Thanks, Kirk.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Ken Wong with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.

Speaker 10

Great. Thanks for taking my question. So obviously a couple of good CDMS wins these last two quarters. Peter, how do you see the recent acquisition of metadata impacting the CDMS market? Do you view that as a general tailwind or headwind for you guys?

Speaker 3

Well, the acquisition of Medidata by Dassault certainly caused a lot of questions about from customers, which is normal and some of those questions were they would ask customers would ask of us. And but we really haven't seen any change in the market. When we look at CDMS, it's really about building the best product, getting customers, getting them live and happy and successful and really innovating in the market. So we have really seen no effect of the acquisition so far. How it will play out in the future?

That's of course unknown and that's not where we'll focus, but we're really focusing in on our customers now.

Speaker 10

Any sense if that might give you guys maybe a bigger window to reach out to customers since there's I guess there's sort of a change in terms of who they have to deal with now or has that also been fairly neutral at this stage?

Speaker 3

So it will cause a customer to consider. That's probably one thing they will consider as they're evaluating a system. But it's not something that we've seen materially affect any of our business or affect any type of competitive dynamics at this time.

Speaker 10

Yes, got it. And then if I can squeeze one in for Tim. Earlier you touched on duration helping billings. Can you talk about what's causing this and should we expect this trend to continue?

Speaker 4

Ken, thanks for the question. So that was of the billings beat, that was a smaller component of the billings beat. Probably roughly half of the billings beat that we talked about was stronger bookings in the quarter. As it relates to duration, it really becomes a mix of the deals that we close in any particular quarter. And it can change based upon when the customer's renewal date is and depending upon the length of the add on order, it could depend upon whether the customers that were closing in a particular quarter are more quarterly billers versus annual.

So there's a lot of different factors which play in there, Ken, and it really depends on the mix. Uptick in billings. Now you can imagine with the complexity there, we're likely on the conservative side as we think about forecasting for that particular component. But as I said, that was not the biggest part of the beat in the billings area.

Speaker 10

Got it. Great. Thanks a lot and congrats on your well deserved extended vacation.

Speaker 4

Thanks, Ken.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from James Rutherford with Stephens Inc. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Yes. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats on the quarter. A couple for me. First on artificial intelligence, we observed a rise in your innovation around AI. Of course, we have Andy and then AI for PromoMats.

And then recently we launched Safety dot ai. So the question is, is it fair to say that you all will just apply AI to really every aspect of commercial and Vault? And I guess, OLS down the road as well? And the second part of that question is, is AI kind of a meaningful TAM expander? Or are these just mostly feature additions that you'll kind of continue to use to differentiate the product?

So a little help on the context for AI.

Speaker 3

Okay. James, yes, AI is a long term trend. I remember when I was getting my computer science degree in the late 80s, there was the early days of AI and it's continued and it's getting more useful and impressive as days go on. Now in terms of Veeva, you will see AI applications from us, different applications that we can make now because the AI capabilities are there that we couldn't make before. So you mentioned Safety dotai and Andi.

Those are fundamentally AI applications, brand new AI brand new applications for us. And then we'll add AI into many areas of our existing applications. So the automatic claims linking and the promo mats, the approved notes for recognizing text sentiment in CRM. So it will what increases our TAM is when we make more applications. AI over the years is going to allow us to make more applications.

That's probably the best way to think about it. And it's going to be a gradual expansion. AI grows over the years, the capabilities, it's not an on and off switch.

Speaker 7

Okay, helpful. Thank you for that. And then Paul, one for you, if I may. We took note of the MuleSoft partnership announced recently. I'm just curious if you can help us understand how that fits with your Nitro strategy, MuleSoft obviously being a leader in Ipass and API management.

So should I think of Mule as just kind of a way to grease the skids and help, life science companies get that data into Nitro more quickly and easily? Just some thoughts around how that fits from a technology perspective. Thank you.

Speaker 6

Yes. So we actually think about MuleSoft a little bit differently and the focus for the announcement that we had with Salesforce around MuleSoft was focused on our Vault applications. So there's different mechanisms on getting Nitro data into Nitro that think of that separately. As our customers are expanding their Vault footprint and getting more and more Vault applications and really kind of these mission critical areas, the number of applications or systems that they need to integrate to becomes higher and higher. So what we look at, we think of the MuleSoft Connector as a way to make those integrations seamless, more seamless, faster, easier and easier for our customers to support and maintain over time.

So think about MuleSoft more specifically as it relates to Vault applications, which is the kind of the focus of that integration today.

Speaker 7

Okay. Thanks for that color. Nice quarter.

Speaker 4

Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Rishi Jaluria with D. A. Davidson. Your line is open.

Speaker 11

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Tim, congrats on all your achievements at Veeva over the past 10 years. They've been a pleasure. I think you set a great standard for other SaaS company CFOs to follow.

So on that, I would love to hear what are you looking for in your replacement to kind of ensure that it's going to be a very seamless transition from you to whoever takes over your seat?

Speaker 4

Yes, Rishi first, thanks for the kind words. I think as Peter and the Board and I look for the key attributes of our replacement, It's someone who, as I think I've tried to build, can be a really good business partner to Peter, to the leaders within the company and can connect to the Board as well. Someone who has some level of domain expertise around SaaS would be very helpful as well because as you talked about the pattern recognition of what are the key metrics and the things that make sense to a SaaS business. Again, it doesn't have to be someone who's been in SaaS for 20 years, but some familiarity would be very helpful. I am more of a finance person.

Our Chief Accounting Officer, Michelle is much more of an accountant. So maybe we fit a mold more like me where it's more of a finance background, as opposed to an accounting background. But I wouldn't rule out either of those, but I think I would lean in that direction. And then really someone who has the level of passion that I think is required for this job and really wants to take on what I think is unbelievable opportunity at an unbelievably impactful company like Veeva. So I don't know if that was a resume description, but there's some of my thoughts.

Speaker 11

Great. That's really helpful, Tim. And then Peter, one for you. If I'm not mistaken, I believe Tom Schrenger joins next month. Would love to kind of hear your perspective on what you expect or what we should hope for out of Tom joining in maybe his first 90 days at Veeva, especially given that the R and D Summit is coming up in the next week and a half, two weeks?

Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. Tom is joining next month and he's a quite accomplished veteran, brings a lot of customer relationships and just knowledge of operating at scale, teams of thousands of people and revenues into the billions at Accenture. So what Tom the area Tom will focus on for us is in the sales area as President and CEO, the field excuse me, not only the sales, but the field area, the customer success, the sales, the services, the strategy area. Tom will be based on the East Coast as well, Philadelphia. So he will cover that region.

And Tom will be one of the key members of the management team and partnering with me. Tom's strength again is in deep understanding of life sciences, execution at scale and executive relationships and team building. And that's what I expect Tom will do for us here.

Speaker 11

Great. That's helpful. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Tim.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Rishi.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from David Hynes with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Speaker 12

Hey, thanks, guys. So I want to follow-up on the CDMS line of questioning. As I think about purchase decision considerations, say for a top 20, is there a competitive advantage to sticking with an incumbent where there may be a data history or is each trial such a unique entity that in theory it would be easier to cut over to a new vendor?

Speaker 3

Good question. Each trial is independent in its data. And the long term repository of the data, meaning where does the data go after the trial is finished? That's an independent system. That's not normally connected.

It's not normally the same as the clinical data management system. It's normally of a you can think of it more of a data repository or a data warehouse that's separate. So that's not an impediment. What is hard for people when they were considering switching is your clinical data management system has to be integrated with your other systems. If you bring in a new clinical data management system, that's other integrations to write and other testing and validation to do because for a while, for a considerable period of time, you'll be running multiple systems.

So that's a tax. So that's why this type of change is not considered lightly. Yes. Did that answer your question?

Speaker 12

No, yes. No, that's perfect. That makes perfect sense. And then maybe kind of a bigger picture question. As we think about product roadmap for Vault, maybe over a 3 year period or so, should we expect new efforts to predominantly stay within life sciences or are we getting to the point where the suite is pretty built out, so maybe we start to see more in new verticals?

And I want to be clear, I'm not asking about sales execution or opportunity. I know there's still a huge runway in life sciences, but more just kind of how the product evolves?

Speaker 3

How the product evolves?

Speaker 4

Well, there is

Speaker 3

a history, I think of honestly, what I believe is there's a history of underestimating the potential inside of Life Sciences. And I saw that in 2010. I saw that in 2015. And now as we approach 2020, I also see that. So I think a lot of our expansion can still come inside of life sciences.

I think we're actually relatively early in the industry cloud for life sciences as surprising as that would seem. Now some proof of that is in, okay, look, the clinical data management area for us is brand new, the safety area is brand new. But there are more things that can be done in life sciences, but I wouldn't underestimate inside of life sciences. And I would say also just in general, our core platform of Veeva Vault, that's in its very early days. I know how these things play out.

When you really invest in a platform, that's something actually that you monetize, we're talking over 20, 30 years. And Veeva, you got to remember, is only 12 years old, yes. But Vault is only 8 years old. So it's still very early days.

Speaker 12

Yes. Okay, very good. That's helpful. Thank you. And Tim, congrats and good luck.

Speaker 4

Thank you, D. J.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Brent Briesland with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Speaker 13

Thank you. I guess one for Peter and one follow-up for Tim, if I could. Peter, it's clearly been an incredible first half for Veeva, milestone quarter here crossing over $1,000,000,000 run rate. I think there's few companies that they're able to do this with accelerating growth across 2 major product categories. So things are clearly humming right now.

My question is more about next year. As you look at the product pipeline, customer opportunity, what are you most excited about looking out into next year given things seem to be going really well right now. But what are you most excited about next year? And then one quick follow-up for Tim.

Speaker 3

Oh, gosh, next year, it's just there's a lot of excitement. We're bringing in new people to the company at an amazing pace. I was just in Denver, Friday let's see, Thursday night, Friday Saturday with close to 250, what we call Generation Veeva people. These are people that are 2 years or less out of college and they're consulting and R and D and commercial and engineering and Pleasanton in Toronto. I'm just excited about the workforce we're developing here.

So that's on one spectrum. On the other spectrum, we're bringing in people like Tom Schwanger and we're growing that middle area. So I'm that's overall what I'm excited about. I'm excited about close to 3,000 people, all with a common culture and really learning how to together. Now, if you get into the product area, I'm really excited about clinical data and safety.

There's new areas that are just super ripe for innovation and very early. And I'm excited about reassurgence in what we can do in commercial cloud and some innovation we can bring in there. So I'm excited about every year. I think 2020 is going to be a great one. And it really piqued my interest like, okay, yes, we got to get after that.

I think it's going to be a great year. I'm not I don't have any financial guidance, do I, Tim?

Speaker 4

No, we cannot give financial guidance.

Speaker 3

But overall, it's I'm really excited about the mojo of the company, and that's created by the people coming into the company and the common culture where people can work together and enjoy it at greater scale. It's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 13

Absolutely. Tim, just again to extend my congratulations on the retirement here. Certainly well earned, great run and you will be missed. Just drilling on down into the commercial cloud growth, I mean, we're seeing here now the Q2 of accelerating growth there. What's driving the improving visibility?

You guided up for the full year here a little bit on the growth profile there. Are these engaged in event management rollouts big enough to kind of drive a sustained improvement in growth there? Or should we think about these things as kind of a couple of quarter rollouts that kind of will then kind of roll off? Help me understand the improvement on the commercial cloud growth side.

Speaker 4

Sure. And Brent, thanks for the question and thanks for the kind words. We're very pleased with what we're seeing in commercial cloud. I would say that the recent uptick in growth that we've seen in the first half of this year, which is, you've seen it impact our guidance is mainly due to particularly strong bookings in the last few quarters. And I would echo what Paul said earlier in terms of where we're seeing the strength from a bookings perspective, it's in CRM enterprise expansions that are going faster than we had anticipated.

It's in SMB wins that are better than we had anticipated. And as Paul said, we are seeing some particular strength in some of the areas, some of the add on areas, Brent, I should say, namely Engage, which Peter talked about, approved email and open data. So I think that's what we're seeing, particularly strong bookings in the last three quarters, which is really driving the uptick in revenue. And as you remember, we've always characterized this as a steady growth business over time. Even given this performance, that view hasn't changed in our minds.

Speaker 13

Got it. Helpful color. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Speaker 14

Thank you. I've got 2 fairly prosaic numbers questions for Tim. So Tim, maybe I missed it, but did you update the full year billings guide, I think on the last quarter of $1,120,000,000 And if I recall, you suggested that 41% to 42% of billings might drop in the Q4. Just want to make sure I didn't miss that.

Speaker 4

Yes, Carl, thanks for the question. The updated billings guide for the year was $1,135,000,000 so an increase of $15,000,000 over last quarter. And that we saw that in part being driven by the outperformance in Q2.

Speaker 14

Got it. Okay. Thanks for that. Sorry, I missed that. And then the second question was on your operating cash flow guidance, Tim, which was for the full year ex the tax benefits a little bit above our estimate and I calculate first half operating cash flow growth of a super strong 40% in the first half.

So congrats on that performance. And I'm just wondering what it's from. Is it just a function of the operating margin outperformance flowing into the operating cash flow line? Or is there a little something extra? Thank you.

Speaker 4

Yes. So if you exclude the excess tax benefit, Carl, then you have the answer correct. It's really the operating income performance, which as you've seen is growing at a faster clip than our top line revenue and that's contributing to the cash flow. And I guess I would be remiss for not calling out my team as well, who have done a phenomenal job, with the help of the field team and certainly the help of the customer success that we've driven over time to really have another strong collections quarter and really an amazing collections first half. So but you're right, it's being really driven off the operating income.

And when you add in the excess tax benefit, that is even a higher growth in terms of operating cash flow year over year than operating income.

Speaker 14

Got it. Okay, Tim. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Chris Merwin with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Speaker 15

Okay. Thanks a lot for taking my question. Just as it relates to QualityOne, I was wondering if there's any update to the revenue run rate there. And then maybe at a product level, can you just talk a bit more about the you're seeing with the newer claims product? I think you might have mentioned some strength in CMG, but just curious what types of customers are taking that product so far?

Thanks.

Speaker 3

In terms of the claims product, we have our early adopters there. Their product is very, very early. And they're all in the consumer packaged goods, which is where claims is generally going to be targeted. And it's going well, but early with that. We're implementing with the first customers iterating the product.

In terms of revenue, we're happy with the progress outside of Life Sciences, but that's not something that we break out at this time and we'll give you further updates as we have them.

Speaker 15

Okay, great. Thanks. And maybe just one follow-up on 8 figure customers, it sounded like last quarter that was going really well. Just curious if there's any update there and you're still on track to reach that, I think, target of 20 by the end of the fiscal year?

Speaker 4

Yes, Chris, this is Tim. So I think you've characterized it correctly. We are continuing to build deeper and larger relationships with our customers and that's been a function of 2 things, I think. 1, well, 3 probably. 1, our customer success, the innovation of our products and the expanding product portfolio, which gives us the opportunity to make a larger impact or create a larger impact for our customers.

We typically have updated that number in our Analyst Day. So why don't I hold off and we'll probably give you an update on that in the Analyst Day. You remember that that was part of the recipe to get to the $1,000,000,000 revenue run rate, which we did eclipse this quarter and Peter mentioned that in his quote. And we're very proud and excited about that milestone. And the team has done a phenomenal job of executing over the last 5 years or 4 years since we gave that target.

Speaker 15

Thanks a lot, Tim, and all the best in retirement.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 1

Your next question comes from Tom Roderick with Stifel. Your line is open.

Speaker 16

Hi. It's actually Parker Lane in for Tom. Thanks for taking my question. So one area we haven't heard as much about in Vault recently is PromoMats. So I was just wondering if you could talk about, what remaining runway you see in your existing customer base for PromoMats adoption and any recent changes you made to that product to make it more appealing to the market?

Thanks.

Speaker 3

Promat is going very well. It is certainly the leader in its market segment. We're happy with the uptake. We still have some zinc migrations to go. We still have some zinc customers and that will be supported until the end of next year, until the end of 2020.

So there are some migrations in cycle. And usually when that happens, there's some growth in that because ProMat has some capabilities that are not there in zinc. So it tends to be expanded usage. We continue to add customers, especially in the SMB market as new customers look to commercialize, that happens. And

Speaker 4

one of the

Speaker 3

things we're I guess, there were 2 things we're quite excited about. 1 is the auto claims linking. So that I think is going to be a real boost for our customers. That's not a new revenue opportunity for AVEVA, but that's really a customer success opportunity for the customers in the industry. And on the related area in what we call the commercial evolve is the medcoms application.

We're seeing good for medical inquiries and managing medical content. So we're seeing good uptake there and we've recently added quite a few features there that we can expand the usage. So we're really happy about how Chromat is doing and overall how the Zinc acquisition worked out. It worked out very well for us and our customers.

Speaker 16

Got it. And then multiple people have referenced the strength of Engage this quarter. Just wondering if that's a factor of increased demand from the market? Or have there been specific features that have finally come out that people have been looking for and been more receptive to really spur that growth and double the customer count over last year?

Speaker 6

Yes. I'll take that one on Engage. So I would say it's really 2 things. So one is, this is a different way of going to market. It's a think of an industry that's been so focused on meeting in person

Speaker 4

and now you give them the ability to

Speaker 6

do something remotely. So there's been a lot of change management. So I think what we're seeing here is over the last couple of years, a lot of customers trying and learning and figuring out how it works and how customers are going to respond and what works well and what some of those best practices are. And they have since learned enough to build that business case and increase the demand. So we're seeing demand from different markets across the globe who want to drive the adoption of that.

So I think there's a learning and change management component. I think that's largely that's happening and that's happening relatively quickly. It's just a natural part of the life cycle of a new product like this. And then I would say the other thing that's driving it is just the shift in our customers' mindset to get to digital faster, to evolve to put in place the infrastructure to support their selling models of the future. All of our customers are in some respect talking about how what their future selling model is going to look like and digital is becoming a bigger and bigger piece of that.

And what we're trying to do is make sure that we enable a lot of that shift in the market with a lot of the innovation. So Engage is one of the products that's driving that.

Speaker 16

Got it. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the allotted time for questions and answers. Our final question will come from Pat Walravens with JMP Securities. Your line is open.

Speaker 5

Hey, this is Joey on for Pat. Congrats on the quarter and thank you for taking our question. Just going off the product questions, we are wondering about any new product initiatives you may have in the pipeline, particularly regarding Vault? Thank you.

Speaker 3

In terms of new product initiatives, well, there's lots of things. There's adding on to existing products and that's going all the time. You got to refine them, you're adding new features and functions, keeping up with the regulation. So that's the bulk and you're doing integrations between our suite. So that's the bulk of things going on.

In terms of brand new products, we always have ideas about that and always thinking about that, but nothing we could announce at this time.

Speaker 5

Thank you.

Speaker 1

I will now turn the call back over to Peter for closing remarks.

Speaker 3

Thank you, operator. I would like to thank everyone for joining us today and we look forward to seeing many of you at our Analyst Day in San Francisco on October 2. And a special thanks to the Veeva team for your effort and teamwork and to customers for their trust and support. Thank you.

Speaker 1

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Powered by