Veeva Systems Inc. (VEEV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you, everyone, for joining us on the webcast today for our 2022 Virtual Analyst and Investor Day. I'm Ato Garrett, Head of Investor Relations here at Veeva Systems. Feel free to contact me if you need anything during today's event or if you have any questions in the future. Some quick announcement before we begin. We have a series of presentations over the next 90 minutes or so, including comments from our customer. At the end of the presentation, we'll have a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Before we get started, I'll read a quick disclaimer. During the course of today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements regarding trends and our strategies, market size and opportunities and the anticipated performance of our business, including guidance regarding future financial results. These forward-looking statements are 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 risk factors included in our most recent filing on Form 10-Q. Forward-looking statements made during today's presentation are being made as of today, November 3, 2022. If the presentations are replayed or viewed after today, the information presented may not contain current or accurate information. Veeva disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. In the presentations, 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 the appendix of today's presentation, which will be posted on our website. And with that, I'll turn it over to our Founder and CEO, Peter Gassner.

Thank you, Ato, and thanks, everyone, for joining our investor call today. You'll see 4 themes today. The first is consistent execution. This is about delivering growth and profit consistently across multiple areas, and we've done that for about 15 years now, and we intend to do that going forward. The second about our durable business model, Veeva is a very durable business. Our products are sticky. They fit together. Our data and our services, they all fit together and we have strong customer relationships. That all adds up to a very durable business model, a real franchise. Third, we're ahead of our 2025 targets. We'll talk about that in some detail. And finally, we have a long runway of growth ahead. That's because we've planted the seeds for future growth that will keep us growing well into 2030 and beyond. All right. I'll start off with our vision and values. This is a very important slide for Veeva. I presented at the start of every important meeting like this meeting or a Board meeting. This starts off with our vision. We're building the industry cloud for life sciences, that's software, data and consulting to help the life sciences industry get more efficient and effective. We want to be essential to and appreciated by every company in life sciences. And our values, that's how we make decisions. The first is do the right thing. That's about morals, about knowing what's right and actively trying to do it. The second is customer success, and that comes in 3 parts. The first is for the people in the industry of life sciences. They can depend on our products and our people, we can be adding value to them and be great to work around. The second is for the companies in life sciences. Our products and services have to deliver positive ROI projects coming on time. And the third is about the industry overall. Veeva has to be an authentic positive force for the industry to help the industry get better. Employee success, that's for our team. Veeva should be a place where our team can do their best work. And speed, that's about getting things done quickly and correctly with high quality the first time. And all things considered, get stuff done today rather than tomorrow. And finally, Veeva is a public benefit corporation. That means we have to optimize for not only shareholders, but for customers, employees and shareholders. We have to balance those interests. We have to be in it for the long term, and that really fits with our industry cloud model. At a high level, we have 3 main customer segments today. Pharmaceutical and biotech, that's where we have over 1,000 customers. And there, we serve companies -- small companies that might be a 50-person biotech that's preclinical, or it might be a 50,000-person global pharma, and that's our biggest segment at about 93% of our revenue today. Medtech, that's for medical devices and diagnostics. That's a newer area for us in a growing area, and then consumer goods. That's where we have consumer packaged goods, specialty chemicals, cosmetics. And a newer area for us in that segment is actually food and beverage. That's an area for expansion. So since pharma and biotech is the bulk of our revenue and the biggest industry, that's what I'm going to concentrate on today. And then another way to look at Veeva's business is in terms of geographies, and this is how our revenue breaks down. About 58% of our business is in the U.S., 28% is in Europe, and the remaining 14% is in Asia and LatAm. So U.S. is a very big market for life sciences, but it also tends to be an early adopter market for us. So it grows a bit faster. And then Europe is kind of a fast follower, and then Asia and LatAm follow from there. And these are large industries. Life sciences, meaning pharma, biotech and MedTech, that's about a $2 trillion industry, and it's growing. Why is it growing? Because the science is advancing. Personalized medicine, cell therapy, gene therapy, advanced diagnostics, the medicines like KEYTRUDA from Merck that are curing things that couldn't be cured before and treating things that couldn't be treated before. So it's a growing industry, it's a big industry, and we want to be the most strategic partner to that industry, with very industry-specific software technology, data and business consulting to help the industry be more efficient and effective. And that is a big market opportunity, and it grows as we make better products, and it grows and it grows. So how much is it going to be worth in the long term? I don't know. It could be as much as 1% of the total industry. I think over time, we could add that much value or $20 billion. But we don't know. We really have to work it out as we go. And what's really going to make a difference is how we execute along the way, and that's what we're going to focus on. When we talk about the Industry Cloud, there are 3 main things that fit together. That's software, data and consulting. Certainly, we started in software, and that's where the bulk of our revenue is. But data and consulting, these are growing areas and they're actually helping our software business. So on -- in terms of product areas, for Development Cloud, that's our software for the R&D and quality area of life sciences. And then Commercial Cloud and Data Cloud, that's for the commercial area for the sales, marketing and medical area. Now all of this is supported by our business consulting team, and consulting is a growing area for Veeva. We started about 3 years ago in the commercial area, and it's going very well. And now we're starting it up in the R&D side of the business as well. So consulting, what does that do? That helps our customers optimize value in and around the Veeva solutions. So that's things like business process design and optimization, change management, metrics and measurement, the things that can really add value when you have the Veeva software in your organization. And our consulting, that's data-driven. It's really data-driven because we collect the data from the applications. We normalize it across the industry. We call that pulse data, and we use that in our consulting offering. So you don't normally see great consulting inside of a tech company, but with Veeva, you do, it really fits. So it's a new kind of model. Software, data and consulting all fitting together, all excellent, all from one company to help an industry. Now this is what we call our product quadrant. It shows product maturity and market share. Now every product that's going to start in the bottom left, immature product, low market share. And the goal is to move every product up to the top right. Mature product, high market share, leading market share. Now that takes time. It might take 5 years, it might take 10 years, it might take 20 years. That's what we do here at Veeva. We move things up and to the right. We focus on product excellence and executing in the market. Now we have about 10 main product areas. And that's a very important thing to know about Veeva. We're very diversified in terms of our products. So for example, we have Veeva CRM, where we started for pharmaceutical sales reps. But we also have our quality suite for people on the manufacturing shop floor. So very different use cases and users and applications, very diversified. Now an important thing to notice about Veeva is we only have 2 products in the high market share quadrant, Veeva CRM where we started, and commercial content, which is our first bulk application. So we have a lot of room to grow. Development Cloud, for example, there, where we have clinical operations, clinical data management, quality, regulatory and safety, that area is only about 20% penetrated when you talk about the applications, just the applications that we have today. So a lot of room to grow for Veeva across multiple areas. We've planted these seeds for growth so that we can keep growing all the way through 2030 and beyond. All right. Let me go into these major product areas, starting with the Commercial Solutions. In Commercial, we have 2 main areas that fit together very well. That's our Commercial Cloud for our software and our Data Cloud for our data. And the reason why they fit together is that they share a common data architecture or a common data model about things like products, health care providers, health care organizations. So that's why they fit together so nicely. So if we look at some of the individual products in these 2 areas, let's start with the CRM suite. So Veeva CRM, that's where we started in 2007, our core CRM product. That's for sales force automation, very specific to life sciences. It deals with things like regulated content, compliance, drug sampling, product detailing, things like that. Veeva CRM, that's a leading product. It's used by over 80% of the pharmaceutical sales reps in the world. We have a great team on Veeva CRM. The product keeps getting better. But CRM, it's more than just CRM in the suite. It's about other products like Events Management. That's about getting groups or health care providers together for education in a compliant way and tracking all that. And then territory alignment about designing and optimizing territories and deploying that into a CRM system. And then Veeva Engage, that's about a digital relationship between a doctor and a pharmaceutical sales rep and exchanging content and communicating in a compliant way. Now in the commercial content area, that's also a leading area for Veeva, where we're market leaders, and we have 2 main products there, bulk PromoMats and bulk MedComms. One is for content in the sales and marketing area, and the other is for content in the medical area. We're clear leaders in these applications. So these applications, they handle content creation, review and approval and delivery, high-speed delivery of content. They act as a digital asset library. So content, that can be of all types, videos, images, documents of all type, and we have a world-class review and markup tool, and the product involved handles all kinds of content. And these applications keep getting better. We're continuing to optimize them, especially for things like modular content to speed content creation and approval. Also, integrations are a core thing here. Of course, these products are deeply integrated with our CRM product to deliver the content, but they're also deeply integrated with our regulatory products because many of these materials have to be published to health authorities before they can be used. We also are part of an ecosystem. Here, we have a great business consulting team and a great creative agency partnership program in and around these products. So we're really leading here and helping the industry move forward with commercial content. And then Crossix for marketing analytics. This is very specific to the U.S. market. Crossix, that measures and optimize marketing spend. So that might be with a website, like WebMD, or social media like Doximity, or that might be with TV advertisements as well. So measure and optimize marketing spend. Crossix came to Veeva about 3 years ago via an acquisition, and it has been a great 3 years. So first, the Crossix core revenue has grown by about 70%, and we've integrated Crossix with CRM. And then we use the Crossix data platform to create Compass, which we'll talk about. That's our patient data product, very important product for Veeva. And Crossix overall, that's taught Veeva so much about analytics. Now Crossix is a clear leader in pharma for marketing analytics, but there's room to grow because we're coming up with new use cases for measurement all the time. And also, there is white space because some companies do their own measurement still, or they might even use creative agencies to do that kind of measurement. So certainly room to grow. It's one thing to acquire the right company, and which we did that in Crossix, but it's another thing to integrate it well, and I'm very happy that we've integrated Crossix well into Veeva. It's adding so much value. And now talking about Compass. That's our patient data, prescriber and sales data very specific to the U.S. market, and we use the Crossix data platform to make that. This is where we're competing with IQVIA, which really has a monopoly position in this market. So it's a hard market to break into, but we want to break into it over the long term. We want to bring innovation, we want to bring customer choice. So the patient data is available today, and we're working with early adopters, and that can come in the form of small biotechs or it might come in the form of specific use cases inside of brands, inside of larger pharma companies. So we're growing and learning with these early adopters, getting to product excellence, and then we'll move from there into the prescriber product and the sales product. So Compass, that's a very important product for Veeva and for the industry overall, and we want to bring that innovation, but it's going to be a marathon. This is a tough market, but we're in it for the long term, and we have the innovation that we can win here. And then Link. That's one of our newer products and platforms, and Link is different. I know of no other company that has a product or a platform like Link. We use Link to build data applications for real-time intelligence. So this is software that runs on our data. That's different. With Vault, for example, the customer brings their data and documents. They load it into Vault, and then they run their workflows on it. That's how a normal application works. But with Link, these data applications, we build an industry data set, multiple industry data sets for the industry, and then Link is software that runs on top of that data and does workflows on top of that data. So it's a very different concept, a new concept. And like anything truly new or disruptive, it starts out small, but it can really grow. So the Link platform, what is that? That is a system of collecting data, integrating and harmonizing publicly available data. It's powered by really expert algorithms and expert people. We have over 1,000 expert data stewards around the world, expert in very specific areas. And then the Link software collects data and assigns workflow to people, does quality checks on it, brings it back together. And then the Link software also learns, and so it can automate certain parts of the process as it goes along. It's a very powerful platform. It's something we've been building for about 5 years now and unique to Veeva. Today, we have 4 Link applications, 1 established one, that's Link for key people, and 3 newer ones that are brand new, just some of them not even entering the early adopter phase yet, but we've announced them. So key people. What is that? It will make Link real. That has deep profiles on the most important key opinion leaders to life sciences. So about 3 million people around the world. We make these deep profiles and keep them up to date. We get the data from a variety of sources, publications, websites, all kinds of social media, things like that, and the Link platform brings that together, harmonizes it, publishes it daily. Now Link for key accounts, that's about health systems and hospitals around the world, whether they're policies, procedures, how are they changing, what are they doing? We're in the early adopter mode with that. And then we have 2 newer products, that's Link for scientific awareness and Link for medical insights. This is about brands and compounds about the awareness out there in the industry of your products, how your message is getting out, how is the adoption going, the thought leadership and what messages are resonating, but not only about your products as a pharmaceutical company, but about other products, competitive products. So Link is true innovation, and it could be big one day, and it's just getting started. So to give you a perspective of how early Link is, the subscription revenue run rate for Link right now is only about $30 million. Now that's -- Link is a big opportunity. So we're clearly in the early days. All right. Let's move to the R&D area. Development Cloud, that's our offering on the R&D side. Development Cloud is the operating system for product development, from clinical through to regulatory, quality and safety, all built on the Vault platform. And the Vault platform is quite a mature platform by now. We started building it in 2011, and it's pretty mature and robust. So Development Cloud, that is modular. Customers can start in any application area and with any application, they grow from there and then they link it together with Vault connections. Development Cloud works for small biotechs and it also works for large pharma. And Development Cloud is quite unique. No other company has an offering like Veeva. And it's a big endeavor. We have well over 1,000 product people working on Development Cloud. Within Development Cloud, clinical operations is where we started, specifically with the eTMF application or electronic trial master file, and that's the market-leading application today. But we have other applications such as CTMS, our clinical trial management system. We're getting great traction there, and that's a very important application. And then we also have newer applications like Site Connect, and Study Training, which we just introduced. These are in the very early, early adopter phase, and they're great applications and important applications. So with clinical operations, we have some mature applications, we have some new applications. It's a big area, and we have a lot of room to grow. Clinical data management, that's a newer area for Veeva. And there, we started with EDC, or our electronic data capture applications. There, we compete with companies like Oracle or Medidata. We think we're making great progress and have the market-leading product, and we'll grow into market leadership over time, but it takes time in this area with EDC. You have to start on a study-by-study basis and grow from there, work through the CRO channel, but we're making great progress. And then we have newer applications like ePRO or patient reported outcomes. Brand new. We're looking for our first early adopters there, very early product, big important area, part of our digital trials platform. And then we have RTSM or randomization and trial supply management that came via an acquisition about a year ago, and we've more than doubled the product team there, and we're making great progress. This is a great, big area, and we're very early. To put it in perspective, this area, the subscription run rate for Veeva is about $30 million, and this opportunity is one of our biggest opportunities. So we're clearly in the very early days, but we're making great progress. I think we're set up to be the market leader. For regulatory, we have our RIM Suite or regulatory information management, and that's quite a mature product set. It's an industry-leading product for regulatory, but there's still a lot of legacy to replace because these are hard and difficult implementations, and the customer has to be ready to do it. So for example, at a large pharma, we may replace 30 or more legacy systems, custom systems, packaged systems and all the integrations between them. So that's a lot of work. So there's a big mess to clean up in regulatory, and we're working our way through that. We have a great product and a great product team. Quality. That's a really big area for us. We have some mature products like QualityDocs where we started, certainly, our industry-leading product. QMS, which is getting quite mature now, and we have a lot of implementations going on. And then we have newer products like training and validation and QC, LIMS for the automation of the quality control lab, and other really big area that's dominated by legacy software, very important area that we want to bring to the cloud. So this is a great, big area of life sciences for Veeva, this quality area dealing with the manufacturing environment. And we're the only company that has an integrated suite of all these applications, and we're making great progress. And finally, safety. We're off to a good start with safety. This is a big important area, a critical area for life sciences. Big news here, we recently had our first top 20 go live with our core safety processing. That was a difficult implementation. That was a hard go live. We had to mature the product a lot. We had great partnership with this early adopter customer. They spoke at our summit, and they're very happy with our progress. And when they spoke at our summit where a lot of other companies were listening because they'd like to modernize their safety system as well. So we're focused on the core safety processing here, adverse event processing. We also have safety docs, which is for the document workflow in and around the safety process. And then over time, we'll bring out a signal application. That's an analytic application to look for signals in the adverse event data stream, signals of safety. So safety is early, and it's an important area. We're off to a great start. All right. I'll show the product quadrant again as a summary. So 10 main application areas, and 6 of them are very early in their product maturity and their market share and life cycle. So plenty of room to grow, especially in areas -- big areas like Clinical and Quality and Compass. So that's why we're confident in our growth ahead because we've planted these seeds for growth a long time ago, and now they're starting to mature. So now I want to take a different lens on our products, a platform lens. So product excellence, that's a core part of Veeva, and our platforms are key to that. So very robust, highly specialized platforms. Those are the key for building great applications and doing that in a very efficient way. These platforms bring us strategic advantage. It's how you get things done faster and better, and it's a very efficient model if you can get it right. And it allows us to build applications that fit together and operate in a consistent way, and that's better for our customers. So Vault for content management and data and the workflow in and around that, this is a very mature platform. It's powering our Development Cloud and our commercial content area. And there's a lot of new innovations coming involved. So things like custom bots for advanced automation and a direct data API for extremely fast data exchange that can be used for system-to-system integration but also used for machine learning applications. A lot of new innovations involved. And then the Link platform, we talked about that, for real-time intelligence for building those new kinds of applications, those data applications. So that Link platform, an elegant mix of people and algorithms, working together. And the machine learning on top of that, we've been working on that for about 5 years now, and that's really coming to fruition. And then the Crossix data platform, usually, we ingest privacy-safe patient data and link it in a patented process, highly accurate linking across multiple data sources, and we use that to power not only Crossix but also our newer data applications, Compass. So I've been involved with platforms for a long time now at PeopleSoft, at salesforce.com in the early days, and now at Veeva. I'm very happy with our platform strategy. It's a core asset for Veeva. Now it's interesting to look at platforms in a different way by the percentage of Veeva revenue that they power. So Vault applications now, they power about 60% of the Veeva revenue and growing. Salesforce.com, platform where we started, that's about 30% of our revenue focused on the CRM area and other platforms like Link and Compass, those are growing, so they power about 10% of our revenue. So this Vault platform has been very successful. When we went public about 9 years ago, what was less than 5% of our revenue, now it's 60% and growing. So we know how to do platforms, and that's a core asset for Veeva. We've talked about products and our strategy, but execution really matters most. It's about picking the right markets to getting into to drive the product excellence, customer success, to start that reference selling model, and that leads to growth and profitability. And that profit, we can invest in new products. So that's how we do it, not very complicated, really, but you have to have the discipline to execute and very important to finish what you start, and that's what Veeva is good at. And we've been executing really well. In 2015, we picked a $1 billion revenue run rate goal for 2020, and we reached that about 1 year ahead of time. And then in 2019, we picked a new goal, a 2025 goal of a $3 billion revenue run rate. And I'm pleased to say we're about a year ahead of target. So we're likely to reach that revenue run rate goal in 2024, in calendar 2024, about a year ahead of time. So that's excellent. But it won't stop there. When we reach that goal, we'll set a 2030 goal. That's what we like to do, set an aggressive goal, execute according to our values and our operating model and go from there. I'll finish with the same 4 highlights: consistent execution, that's about growth and profit, customer success following our operating model and doing that over the long term. A durable business model, we have excellent customer relationships. We have enterprise products that fit together well. We're building a franchise. And we're ahead of our 2025 targets, and we have plenty of room for growth from there. So with that, I'll hand it over to Brent to talk more about our financials.

Thank you, Peter. Before we start, I'll give a directional update on our Q3, which ended this Monday. Overall, we executed well in Q3. We expect to report results at or above our previous guidance. We saw no material weakening or strengthening of the macro environment or customer sentiment over the past 90 days. Like everyone, we did see further weakening of the euro and yen versus the U.S. dollar. As a reminder, more than 80% of our billings are in U.S. dollars. Overall, we're happy with our execution in Q3, and we'll talk more about that on our Q3 earnings call. As you can see, Veeva has a strong history of execution with strong growth and profit. This is a result of a clear and consistent operating model. I'd like to share some perspective on how we achieved these results. It starts with identifying clear and correct target markets. We build new products with a plan to lead in the market over the long term. More importantly, we don't enter markets unless we think there's a good chance for leadership. We have discipline in market selection, which is rare in enterprise software. Next, we focus on disciplined and accurate hiring in the product and go-to-market teams, great people and not too many. We find early adopters and drive the product excellence through close partnership with those customers. A product might take 2 years in the early adopter phase or it might take 5 or more years. It depends on the depth of the product and how well we execute. The early adopter process is not that predictable. There's a lot of random chance in the early days of a product, but in the long term, it's about consistent execution and staying with it. Once we've established customer success for our early adopters, we move into the reference selling model. The reference selling model at Veeva is a well-oiled machine. It's highly efficient and helps drive adoption and industry efficiency. It moves the industry forward. This operating model started in the early days of our commercial business and continues to be as effective as ever with our R&D and data businesses. Inside Veeva, you will often hear people say, execution matters most. We have a clear operating model and we stick to it. We get the work done. When we look at spending, you can see it reflects our industry cloud operating model. A couple of points I'll call out, 18% of our revenue is spent in R&D, while 12% of revenue is in sales and marketing. So 50% more on R&D than on sales and marketing. This is unusual in enterprise software. This means we're delivering high product value to our customers while spending less in sales and marketing. This is the industry cloud model at work. I'll also call out our services margins. Services and business consulting are about 20% of our revenue and run consistently at margins above 25%. It is common for software companies to have unprofitable services units. Veeva doesn't do that. We have discipline in our services and business consulting practices and run them at healthy margins. Business consulting margins are expected to be somewhat higher than services margins over time due to the strategic and data-driven nature of the work. When I look forward, I think the strong performance will continue for many years. First, our customers are successful. They look at Veeva as a partner. The feeling is good. Enterprise software, that good customer feeling has real business value. I would not underestimate the long-term value of this customer relationship asset. And as I discussed earlier, we have a history of disciplined execution that is ingrained in the operating model and in our people to maintain that good feeling. This will continue. Second, we are strong innovators. We have an innovation engine that is making new products and reinventing existing products all the time. For example, we continue to see valuable innovation on our market-leading products like CRM and also the work on the Vault platform. We also have many newer products in the market and that have significant room to grow, like Safety and Compass. And we're bringing groundbreaking innovation to market, like the Link platform. We also innovate and grow through targeted acquisitions, Zinc, Crossix and Veracity Logic. We don't do many acquisitions, but we execute very well when we do. If we look at the product quadrant again, there are 10 large families of products on this slide, and 8 of them are in the lower half of the market penetration, including all of our largest opportunities. These are seeds of growth that are already planted and are starting to grow. I'm confident we'll add more in the coming years. We expect Veeva will be profitable and growing company for far beyond our 2025 $3 billion revenue target. I'll give a brief update on our TAM. TAM is not a metric we manage to internally. When we enter new markets, the full extent of TAM is often not really known. We learn more as we build excellent products and innovate in unexpected ways, which expands our TAM. An example of this is Veeva Link. We think it is going to be quite big, but we don't really know how big yet because it is early. We're not making an adjustment to our $13 billion-plus TAM this year. As we've discussed today, we do think we're adding to our market opportunity through continued innovation, and we expect to increase our TAM in the future. When we have a clear view on the size of some of our markets, we are entering and creating. Our product planning and execution is producing results. As Peter highlighted, I'm happy to say we're tracking about 1 year ahead of our 2025 targets, which calls for a revenue run rate of $3 billion and an operating margin above 35%. We are executing well across both commercial and R&D, which are both tracking ahead of our 2025 revenue targets. It's just consistent execution across the board in R&D and commercial, in enterprise and SMB and in the U.S. and international. The operating margin target of 35% plus is a floor and allows for optionality in how we invest for long-term growth. Now that our 2025 goals are in sight, we are already thinking about our 2030 goals. We expect to set those formally and publicly when we reach our 2025 goals. I'd now like to go over 3 process changes as we go forward in the areas of multiyear ramping deals, inflation and annual guidance. We have always tried to be consistent in our customer contracts. In the past, most of our orders had a 1-year term, so the notion of termination rights was not that important. Now as we're creating the operating system for drug development, multiyear deals with ramping subscription fees are becoming more common. Historically, we've had a variety of different termination rights for ramp deals across customers, resulting in inconsistency in our contracting process and variability in revenue recognition. Going forward, we are standardizing termination for convenience or TFC, for our customers with multiyear ramping deals. This allows a customer to terminate a master subscription agreement with Veeva without cause given a predefined notice period. This change will simplify our contracting and provide consistency for our customers. We don't expect any material change in customer relationships or retention. Here is an example of how contracting terms can impact revenue recognition over the term of a multiyear ramping deal. In this example, we have a 3-year deal with a $1 billion ramp of $2 million in year 1, $4 million in year 2, and $6 million in year 3. As you can see, for ramp deals with TFC, the subscription revenue ramps over time in line with our billings rather than ratably over the life of the contract. Also, you can see that the linked and total value of the contracts are not impacted. So let's summarize the key takeaways from this change. We plan to standardize the TFC rights we offer customers effective February 1 of next year. That's in line with our general approach of trying to contract consistently across our customer base. As we illustrated an example, the inclusion of TFC can impact the timing of revenue recognition. For fiscal year '24, we expect this change to create about a $60 million revenue headwind relating to onetime adjustments associated with adding TFC to existing ramp deals. We expect this to result in about 150 basis points of headwind to non-GAAP operating margin. This change does not impact billings or cash flow. Once through fiscal year '24 and fiscal year '25, subscription revenue growth will be more aligned to billings growth and more representative of the momentum in the business. Inclusive of these financial impacts, we remain on track to reach a $3 billion annual revenue run rate, about 1 year ahead of our calendar 2025 target with operating margin of 35% plus. Since our founding in 2007, we have never raised the price of subscription products for customers at renewal. However, current inflation is now at a high level and could remain high in the coming years. As a result, we are introducing a new annual process to incorporate an inflation adjustment for new and renewal order forms. The annual increase will be the lesser of CPI or 4%, and the first increases will start April 1, 2023. We think this pricing adjustment reflects a reasonable and balanced approach to managing the current inflationary environment. It's a predictable approach for customers. We communicated this approach to customers in September and has been well received. The impact of fiscal '24 revenue will be minimal. It will take a few years to roll out across our customer base due to the timing of the inflation adjustment, the timing of customer renewals and the contracting terms of specific customers. As it related to fiscal year 2024, we will provide our first look at fiscal '24 guidance on our Q4 '23 earnings call. This is a change to prior years where we provided an initial guide on a limited set of metrics on our Q3 earnings call. This is a new approach to our annual guidance and one that we will continue going forward. Having the extra quarter to refine our guidance helps us focus on execution and provide more accurate guidance. We are creating the industry cloud for life sciences by bringing together software, data and consulting. This is something that has not been done before. We are building industry-specific products and services that are supporting our customers' most critical activities. These are not discretionary areas of spend for our customers. With our software products, we are creating new ways of working that speed drug development and commercial operations. Our data solutions provide insights and information that optimize our customers' activities and use of technology. Consulting brings it all together by providing unique insights based on information from our software products backed by data. We have an excellent team, a deep team, a very durable business model that will support Veeva's growth as we execute on the large opportunity ahead of us. With that, we are scheduled for a 10-minute break before we turn to Paul to get a customer's perspective. [Break]

Welcome back, everyone. If you've been following Veeva for some time, you probably hear us talk a lot about becoming a strategic partner to our customers. Well, I get to talk a little bit about what that means. And I get to introduce you to one of our customers who's going to share her view on the important role that partnerships play in executing on her strategy and how Veeva has grown into becoming one of her most strategic partners. At the highest level, we think about strategic partnerships is becoming essential and appreciated. And that means powering some of our customers' most critical business functions with modern technology, with data and our expertise and it's about gaining the confidence and the trust and our customers to go Veeva first. So you heard Peter talk about it briefly as he was referencing the long-term partnership that we just signed with Merck. That announcement, of course, is a big milestone, and it's a first of its kind. But the foundation that we're putting in place that led to that milestone, it's not unique to that one customer. In fact, it's our operating model. It's how we work. It's our approach to working with the entire industry. And that foundation was years in the making. And the foundation has a few key pillars. First is a vision, a shared vision that better and connected technology and data can help the industry develop and commercialize medicines more effectively and ultimately to deliver on better patient outcomes. Second, it's about product excellence and product excellence meaning the never-ending focus on building reliable products, products that work today, but are also designed for the future. And it's about using technology to challenge and rethink ways of working that are more efficient and ultimately more effective. And then third, I would call out trust. We talked a little bit about that earlier, but its trust from years of consistent execution and customer success. It doesn't mean perfection, but rather that commitment to doing the right thing for our customers and for the industry over and over again. So I'm sure it's helpful for you to hear the Veeva view on how we drive towards creating strategic partnerships. But I want you to hear directly from one of our customers about how partnership has become more strategic to them over time. And for that, I'm pleased to be joined by Cindy Hoots, Cindy is the Chief Digital Officer and CIO for AstraZeneca. Cindy leads the strategy and the execution for how AstraZeneca uses technology globally to impact their business performance, but ultimately with a focus on driving better patient outcomes. Cindy joined AstraZeneca about 3 years ago. And after a very long career of senior digital and IT leadership roles at some of the world's leading companies like BAT, Mars Incorporated, and Unilever. Thank you so much for joining us to help our investors get a deeper understanding of our partnership. Welcome, Cindy.

Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

So many people probably know AstraZeneca has a strong bio innovator given your long history in addressing chronic diseases, your evolution to oncology and in rare disease and then more recently in your fight against COVID and your company has a vision and your words to address some of the biggest health care challenges facing human kind and to change the lives of billions for the better. And Cindy, that's where I'd like to start. What do you view as your and your organization's role in helping your company advance this remarkable vision?

Health care faces challenges all over the world. And as the burden of disease grows and the population is aging, the health needs of billions of people remain unmet. We believe that science is the key to help unlock the answers to these health care challenges. Empowered by digital and data and AI, we're seeing that science is accelerating our understanding of these diseases. AstraZeneca is harnessing science to create novel therapies and vaccines with the goal of helping people with chronic conditions with better, more fulfilled lives. We're also redefining cancer care and pioneering treatment for rare diseases. And from an IT perspective, we're ensuring that we're using the most modern technology possible to advance science and help to drive better patient outcomes.

Given that, can you elaborate more generally on the role partners play in executing your strategy?

Having the right strategic partner is really key to our success and the realization of our vision. The world is getting more complex and to be successful, we're looking to work with a select number of very strategic partners. We're moving to a much more platform-based approach that will allow us to gain greater leverage, connectivity as well as scale. Vault is a great example where we've been able to scale the platform across many of our development and quality processes. This has streamlined how we operate globally and empowered our business to work collaboratively across functions. Focusing on a smaller number of highly strategic platforms allows us to invest more deeply into those partnerships and to build more robust and strategic relationships. We're able to go broader and deeper while simplifying the overall user experience. Recently, we've made a lot of progress in simplifying our technical estate and reducing the number of applications. We now have fewer, more strategic partners, and this simplification immediately unlocks value by creating greater speed and agility. There's still more to do, but together with our partners, we put in place a strategy and platforms that are allowing us to accelerate innovation.

So I'm going to drill in one level deeper. Can you share how Veeva fits in?

Absolutely, Veeva is one of our strategic partners. We have a shared holistic vision that's centered around the end-to-end patient journey. Our partnership with Veeva started about 8 years ago in our commercial business. And today, Veeva CRM is the foundation of our omnichannel customer engagement and a key component of how we interact with health care professionals. We then began to implement applications across the clinical space. And in 2020, we went live with Vault Clinical, which enabled a major shift for us in how we operate and allowed us to streamline our clinical processes and we're continuing to work together to further innovate in this space. We also use Veeva as 1 of the key platforms across our quality function, which has further deepened our collaboration, Vault QualityDocs and QMS allow us to ensure that quality is at the center of our manufacturing as well as our development processes. Most recently, we've been on the path to expand our adoption of Vault into the regulatory functions. AstraZeneca has a shared public aspiration of delivering 20 new medicines over the next 8 years. Vault Regulatory is one of the key components to scaling our regulatory processes as we introduce new medicines, indications as well as new geographies. As we continue to evolve our business, it's great to see Veeva's platform strategy and the expansion into new areas. Looking forward, as I think more broadly about our enterprise strategy, we need to ensure that together, we're not only delivering on our most critical functions today, but also working with partners like Veeva who can help us to plan, innovate and navigate the future.

As expected, very thoughtful and insightful comments about your approach to partnering and how Veeva fits into your overall strategy. Speaking of partnerships, we very much appreciate the collaboration with you, with your team, and with AstraZeneca to continue to push each other to advance our journey together. Cindy, thank you again so much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me and for our continued partnership.

So you heard from Cindy that our partnership like most relationships has evolved over time, but not every relationship evolves into something that's strategic. It has to have the right key ingredients. And for Cindy, that was starting small in a few key areas in building success. And for us, that was CRM and Commercial and then Clinical and R&D. But having that shared in broad vision, both companies had the same common vision of using digital, data and technology to improve drug development and commercialization, and that shared vision led to significant expansion across AstraZeneca with a much higher purpose. And then finally, it requires the right and modern technology and Cindy is driving the shift to fewer, more strategic platforms. She described the leverage and the connectivity that they get from the breadth and the depth of the Vault platform. And with that, expansion and innovation in new areas such as new Veeva products, for example, only increases that leverage and the opportunity for our customer. We're in the early stages of a multiyear journey with many of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. We strive to continue to have our customers look to us to collaborate very closely with them, but also to help lead the way. With that, Peter, I'll turn it back over to you.

All right. Thanks, Paul. I appreciate that. I really appreciate the partnership from Cindy and from AstraZeneca. So pleased with that. And with that, I will start the Q&A process, and I'll hand that over to Ato.

Thanks again for everyone participating in our Virtual Analyst and Investor Day. [Operator Instructions] So our first question is coming from Dylan Becker with William Blair & Company.

There we are. Appreciate all the color today. Maybe I wanted to hammer in on one of the areas that was a little surprising to me too, around the quality segment, Peter, been an area you guys have highlighted on a number of recent calls, but I think it's still relatively tied to that lower quadrant within that space. So maybe can we help dig in and understand the opportunity better. I'm sure it's more within pure digitization of the data workflows here. But what are you doing in quality, particularly to drive that sustained success and momentum. And then where do we think that, that growth runway can look like and what that solution could look like from a penetration standpoint over time?

Quality is a awesome area. I love that area. So we started an application called QualityDocs. That's what you would consider SOP management or standard operating procedure management. Okay. There's a procedure in there for cleaning a certain machine that might be very critical, right? To change control around that, the ability to track who knows that. That's where we started. And then QMS, right? This is a quality management system, things like what's called capitals deviations when you have a quality problems, how you're tracking resolve that. So those, by the way, never have been done together in a common data model by any software vendor because of a very, very different applications. You can't do it unless you have a platform like Vault that both handles content and data, you can't do it. So we did that. Now then we put training in there. Training is a super important thing. And a company like, for example, AstraZeneca, can you imagine the criticality of training? And now we're adding what's called QC LIMS in there. We're just looking for our first early adopters there, that's maybe the biggest application of them all in the quality area. That's for the workflow around testing during and after the manufacturing process quality controls because when you're making a medicine that goes into the human body, you better believe that's tested rigorously, right, for I think, for very obvious reasons why that has to be tested. And if you look at the complexity of the medicine manufacturing process now, this is absolutely in the economic impact, not to mention the social impact, I think it's super important. So that's why I'm excited about quality, and that's why you saw it in a lower quadrant because the application, for example that we just introduced, just looking for first adopters is actually the biggest application of them all. So what this leads into? I'm sorry for going long on this, but when we had our customer summit recently and we had the head of quality for actually, I believe that was AstraZeneca, talking on the business side. What they explained is this quality system can improve quality at their company by developing a quality mindset. So it's that strategic. And that's a strategic as you get not to mention, most likely in a big pharma, this quality suite will replace probably at a minimum 40 separate applications and maybe up to 100 different applications. And you think about how that can; a, that's why you know it takes a while to do. But also that's how you know there's tremendous efficiency when you replace that many implications. You asked a short question. You got a long answer, but I love the quality area.

No, appreciate the thoughtfulness there. Maybe one other one, is if I could. You talked about the strength recently in business consulting haven't been around for a couple of years, maybe Peter and Paul, how you're thinking about that, adding value to not only the commercial piece, but I think you announced that you're doing it and moving it into the R&D side as well. How does that help position you and think about kind of adoption and innovation going forward there as those use cases, in particular, are merging themselves?

Yes, I'll take that one. So that is a great question. I view those as the 3 pillars of Veeva, software, data and consulting on equal footing. That's how important consulting is, business process consulting to help get value in and around Veeva. Our customers are really asking for that. And the difference is, it's coming from a company that they have a deep relationship with that really knows the industry. And our consulting group is powered by the data in our applications. So over time, we will know, well, what is the average time to start up a clinical research site in the U.S. in the oncology area. Let's just say it's 2 months for an example, but then we could work with the customer what your process is actually 4 months or your process is actually 6 weeks. That's value that we can bring. So that's why consulting will permeate Veeva on all areas, just as data will permeate in all areas, but of course, where we started this software. And so that's revenue takes time to build out. So that's when we started. So really excited about that. That was a very strategic move by Veeva 3 years ago and it's going very well.

Thanks, Dylan. Really appreciate your question. Our next question will be from Ken Wong with Oppenheimer Securities.

Am I live, guys?

Yes, Ken, thanks for joining the broadcast.

Fantastic. Maybe just first question for you, Brent. I wanted to just dig in on the termination clauses. Just wondering kind of what spurred these clauses in terms of how we should think about the ramp deals like any change in the trajectory of ramp deals? And then just lastly, on the billings, cash flow side, it's fair to assume that nothing changes there, no impact. So as we're thinking about '24 and beyond that those estimates should largely remain unchanged?

Brent, do you want to take that one?

We may be having a technical issue there with Brent's Zoom connection.

Well, maybe while we wait for Brent, I've got one for you, Peter or maybe Paul, just -- on the pricing side, should we want to assume that this kind of CPI adjustment might be kind of an annual thing? And then any customer feedback considering Veeva has never raised price in the history of the company. It's a bit like charging $8 for Twitter. I just wanted to get a sense for kind of what the feedback has been.

Well, it's a good question. Now I wouldn't say I've never heard Veeva have been compared to Twitter, but that's a first, and that's okay. We're not judgmental here. No, seriously, though. Yes, Veeva, we've not raised prices. So in effect, when you look at some of our prices from 2010, our current price now for that prescription, if you look in constant dollars, it's down over 30%. So we've actually been -- you could consider it as lowering prices. With inflation running high, that just can't continue forever. And I think what our customer feedback has been great because we did it in the Veeva way. We communicated well ahead of time. It was very structured, very moderate, easy to plan. So I'm really happy with our approach there. Brent, I answered the question on the inflation, but I'm going to let you answer the question as it relates to the TFC.

Yes. Sorry about that, Ken. When you were brought in, I was dropped as a panelist somehow. So I'm back. So regarding your TFC question, so why are we doing it? It's really about consistency and clarity in our customer contracting. We haven't seen any sort of uptick or anything like that in TFC or really any change in trajectory of multiyear deals. Historically, we mostly had 1-year deals. And we've been -- our rights have been differing from customer to customer. So this is really about creating a simple and transparent contracting practices for our customers. And then how this will play through? If you think about it, it will be a onetime adjustment to subscription revenue in fiscal year '24. No impact to billings or anything like that in fiscal year '24. And then you kind of get back on track as you look at fiscal year '25 billings and revenue on a dollar basis should be more normalized. The growth rate will normalize as you get through that period in 2016, if that makes sense.

Thanks, Ken, appreciate joining the call. All right. And our next question is going to come from Saket Kalia from Barclays.

Okay. Great. Can you folks see me and hear me?

Yes. I can see you. Yes.

Okay. Excellent. Thank you for hosting this, a lot of good stuff that you're on. Brent, maybe for you. Just to pick up on that last question with TFC. I just want to make sure I understand the path to the earlier target in conjunction with the TFC adjustment. You touched on a little bit there, but I just want to make sure I understood. So it looks like I think TFC could be a few points of total revenue headwind in fiscal '24. So I guess the question is, is it fair to assume that we should model revenue acceleration then in fiscal '25 and then to the early point, really no impact to billings growth or cash flow through that time. Is that kind of the right way to think about the revenue sort of path, if you will?

You're talking about from a growth rate perspective, so the mechanics of it is, there is an adjustment to '24. So subs revenue in '24 will be lower than it otherwise would have been related to this adjustment. And then in '25, there is no such adjustment, right? So then you're kind of back on track. And that's why when I look at fiscal year '25 and I look at our ability to hit the target about a year ahead, there's not a material impact related to TFC. If that makes sense?

It does. That does. Yes, that's really helpful. And then maybe a question for you, Peter. Just on that inflation adjustment. I just want to be clear, is it fair to say that, that pricing adjustment again, which is so transparent, so easy to plan for? Is that going to be something that happens across the portfolio? I mean, I think a lot of times we've thought about just the value that -- we've kind of focused that pricing discussion on commercial cloud historically, but I just want to be clear, this sounds like a pricing adjustment that would happen across the entire portfolio. Is that right?

Yes. It's across the portfolio. Now this relates to subscription products. Of course, our professional services and consulting, we've always adjusted those as needed on a basis, right, that supply and demand and cost in the region. So this is really what we're talking about is subscription prices yes. So it's not specific to any product. It's across all the products.

Thanks, Saket. We appreciate you joining the call. And our next call is going to come -- our next participant is Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs.

Two from my end. The market shed data that you're sharing with us for the quarter on the slide. When we think about the 6 applications that are earlier in their market share journeys, give us a sense, are there are a couple that you would say you have higher confidence in getting 80%. Are there some on maybe the 80% market share target doesn't make sense because it's more of a duopoly or all out. So a little bit on whether the market structures of the new apps can actually approximate perhaps the 80% share of the places that you have on the commercial cycle.

A really good question. I'll take that. Hopefully, I give you not a super long answer, but I will go back a little bit to the founding of Evan I was right there in the beginning, we said, "we want product excellence, which means we don't want too many products, and every product should be the leader, and we actually had a mathematical formula in the industry-specific. We said leadership means 40% or more market share. Because if you have 40%, you're probably going to be the leader in your -- it means you're going to have somewhere between 40% to 100% over time. That's how that works. If I look at those products, any product we make, I think there's a network effect. So I think we have a good chance to be at 40% or more leader. And I think I didn't think we -- when we started, I thought it's most likely going to be more of a duopoly type of thing. It turns out there's usually 1 lead dog. And that's how it works. So I don't think there's any difference in any of those products. There's no structural thing that says, hey, this product area should have 7 providers of equal magnitude. It's not like that. The relentless pursuit of excellence. The markets you can't put enough effort to make 7 great products. The economics don't work out. Now I would say the other thing is all every single 1 of those 10 areas, they have relationships and integrations to other areas. So it's also like for example, something like SAP, right? It's about having extent area, but also you have an advantage if you have all the areas covered. Now they're doing something different than Veeva, right? I'm not saying we're getting into ERP, right? That's something different. I'm saying of the industry-specific applications, you actually have an advantage in relationships and in product integration. So there's -- basically, there's nobody else trying to do -- I guess an important point. Nobody else is trying to do what Veeva is doing, right? You can't look at another company trying to do what Veeva is doing. And it's a very, very long effort. So if somebody would try to do what Veeva is doing, which is the whole comprehensive suite. That's a 15-year grind. You can't just kit to developers and write some Java script and get there, it takes a while. And we started out with that. And so that's why I feel confident. And we just have to remain product excellence. How can we have 10,000 people, all excellent, all working together, all humble, all hungry? That's -- our competition is ourselves. So that's again, a long answer. I guess this Zoom format is easier, and I can see people so I can talk to people I love better than just the conference calls. All right. Sorry.

My follow-up, if I may. So CDMS, I'd love to get an update on customer feedback that you're getting on the CDMS side and more specifically, what is the next couple of technical milestones that you're looking to hit either because of the feedback or that you're particularly excited about on the R&D road map side within CDMS?

Yes, within CDMS. We talk about CDMS sensor clinical data management system, and we would say that's our EDC product and our clinical database product. But I think the broader thing to talk about is our clinical data management area and that includes our EDC, our what's called RTSM, randomization trial supply management, patient-reported outcome as part of our digital trial and then our clinical database for clinics. So it's a suite of products, super important because this is the way companies do clinical trials. They collect data in multiple different ways from patients. They need that to get their drug approved to improve safety, right? It's the heart of the life sciences industry. So where we started is in EDC, but there's many applications now in the clinical data area. What -- our advantage there is really a better EDC system, faster building of the technical features of the study, faster amending, better for complex studies, better for the site experience. We're in a good spot. We just have to continue to execute. So just rounding out the corners in the EDC, continue to execute not make errors. I think we still make a little bit too much errors with our customers. We had to fix that stuff up. I'm really confident. And then I really like our great start in our RTSM area. Actually, we bought this company called Veracity Logic about a year ago, a small company but a pretty mature product. We've roughly tripled the team and roughly tripled the revenue in less than a year. And that just shows that -- if you show up to your customer with a partnership approach and more products and more products that fit together, you're better off. So I -- and also like the CDB, what we call the clinical database for -- that brings in data from all different areas and allows customers to do cleaning and it's data that might not even come from a Veeva application. That's unique to Veeva, nobody else has something like that on the market. So there is where that's a real innovation. So excited about that area, too, actually.

And Peter, your comment on errors, is that just a question of maturity of products you're getting more filtering on the data or maybe just explain that little more.

And I don't want to make too much of a big deal about that because everybody has errors, but it's maturing our product and our services process so that we -- sometimes, you'll have a product, and you can have a little hole that your people can fall into and make an error. You got a close that off in your product. So people can't fall into there and make an error. Now we've ever had it. I'm not talking about an error that stops a trial or something like that. It's just an error that causes us to do some rework and some delays, and I don't want to have any of that. Now to be fair, all the EDC systems out there, they have that. The industry has gotten used to having that. But it's not clean. I don't want any of that.

And next attendee will be DJ Hynes from Canaccord.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for doing this. Gabriela will be the punch in the CDMS questions, but it's actually a good segue. I want to get a little bit more pointed there. It's a part of the business that I'm excited about. Peter, for you, just curious, look, it's been 3 years since Medidata was acquired. I'm curious like specific to that customer base, like what are the opportunities that you're seeing there? What are you hearing from potential customers that may look to cut over? And then the follow-up question there is just -- like what's the time line that we should be thinking about measuring your success in CDMS?

Let's see. What am I seeing there as it relates specifically to Medidata? I'm not seeing particularly any changes for the better or worse. They're a strong competitor. I'm not seeing tremendous innovation there, but they're a strong competitor. They're certainly the market share leader there. I feel like we have advantages deep structural advantages, deep ones. So this ability to build studies on the fly. It wasn't built into Medidata, you can't redo that. The ability to change amendments, complex oncology trial will have a thing called an amendment often. So you're changing the protocol because things are adapting. Indeed, you don't have to unload the data to do that. Maybe you do -- that's a big thing. But then the biggest structural one is, we're building this clinical data management system, but we also have a clinical operation system, and those 2 things need to work together. That's not something that Medidata really has, clinical operation system. So that's -- those are our structural advantages. But again, Medidata strong competitor, good company for sure, and they make us better because they compete, and I think we're probably going to make them better as well. Now in terms of how should you measure us? I think -- we don't break out specific revenue numbers normally, but you'll see it on the big CRO wins and the big enterprise wins, right? That's how you see it. And honestly, if you're doing your checks in the industry, you'll see it there and the momentum.

So just curious, is it like 3 years to inflection, 5 years, 10 years, like what?

I think the inflection is happening now. You just count the revenue on these larger things that actually can ramp over 5 years, that type of thing because it really starts small but I believe the inflection is happening now. Yes.

Okay. That's helpful. And then maybe a follow-up for Brent, if I could. Just going back to the TFC changes, like what percent of subscription revenue falls into these multiyear with escalating subscription terms bucket that is affected by this change?

Yes. What we've said is 80% of our deals plus our 1-year deals overall. So there is that balance that is the multiyear ramping deals. And we've had, like I said, a mixed bag of where we had TFC as a right in those contracts. And so again, the reason for this is just to drive consistency and clarity in how we operate and that will flow through with more consistency and less variability in revenue as well.

Yes. Okay. So it's sub-20% if I think.

Thanks, DJ. Appreciate you joining the call. And up next, we'll be joined by Anne Samuel from JPMorgan.

And I was just curious to know, given you're tracking so far ahead of your margin targets at this point, why not raise your guidance? Or are you planning to maybe reinvest some of that outperformance back into growth? Or are you maybe just leaving a little bit of question?

Yes. So first, what is it? So this is a 35% plus was a floor that we've established. So it's not our forecast. It was the target that we had. We're operating at about 38% op margin this year is our forecast. And this allows us optionality for us to do some strategic investing if we choose so for long-term growth. So that's the thought process around it.

That's helpful. And then maybe just one more. You talked about not really seeing a change in the macro backdrop, not really impacting your demand, still being able to meet and exceed your targets. I was just wondering if you're seeing any difference may be between the commercial side versus the R&D side in terms of that demand or growth are equally strong.

Yes. So the comment was relative to our guide about 60, 90 days ago. We haven't seen broadly any improvement nor weakening relative to that. So it's just kind of -- that's the broad statement that we've made.

Thanks again for joining the call, Anne. And our next question is going to come from Stephanie Davis with SVB Leerink.

So first of all, I know you said a lot of really wonderful things going on, on the different size of pricing and growth in macro. I keep looking back on your balance sheet, and I see a massive amount of cash. So I'd love to find out how much cash you need on the balance sheet for all of your different initiatives. And beyond that, what your M&A priorities look like?

I'll take that one. Yes. Cash on the balance sheet is a good thing to have. Cash, it'd be an uncomfortable.

Not bad in this environment, right?

Yes, that will be an uncomfortable thing actually not to have. Now what we're going to do with that, we -- the thing that you can do with that is you can do acquisitions, right? And that's what we'll look at. But you don't want to rush into those, right? It has to be a meaningful thing that we have had a track record so far of 100% success on our acquisitions. Now I think I've been around in tech a long time. I've seen that about 80% of acquisitions fail. So like this is really precision work. So it's about finding the right target. And we look all the time, but of course, we wouldn't explain about the things that we're looking at. I think we'll find things over time. But it's a bit unpredictable because it has to be the right market, has to be the right cultural fit. And those things we can scan for and control. But the other company also needs to want to sell, right? And so you just -- the timing has to be right, the puzzle pieces have to fit together, and you have to have the discipline to say no. So we look at we'll look at 50 things and say no to 49 of them.

Well, let me ask the follow-up on kind of a related vein then. You've got pharma in a cost-cutting environment. You are in the cap gird seat. It sounds like you're still selling a lot. Are there any adjacent market opportunities you're looking at that could benefit from a cost-cutting environment that Veeva could either go in through an organic or inorganic basis?

Life sciences, I don't think they're -- actually, I don't think they're in a cost-cutting environment because the science is just exploding, right? So they're in streamline -- in life sciences, really there's 2 those very large global pharmas. These are companies that have a lot of products in there, they want to get capabilities there and science so they can bring products through their commercial pipeline, like that's what they want to do. A small biotech, they're a product-led company they're focused on innovation and getting that trial out there. So neither of those are cost-cutting environments, really they're innovation-oriented environments. And then are there other industries, consumer goods, we're working on that one, MedTech as well. And we're going to focus there. We've got plenty of work to do. I think one thing people don't know is how big Veeva can be. And I've seen it a lot throughout my career in tech. I started out in the mainframe days and the open system days and then people at the first like they're laughing. What is this Linux thing? Well, it's a toy? What would you do with that? That runs the critical infrastructure of the world today. It's a huge part of thing. When I joined Salesforce, we had 200 people in early 2000s. And I remember when I was going there and then a respected leader of another tech company says, why are you going there that is cloud stuff. It's -- that company is never going to be more than $50 million. It's just that can't work. Everything big starts small. Amazon's Web Services when it first came out, people didn't get it that, that was going to be the world's biggest computer company. They didn't get it. When Veeva started, people thought that's Kezar, what is that? And now it's approaching $3 billion of revenue. So the industry cloud model is still underestimated. If we can do things in technology, it couldn't be done before for the industry, it's much bigger than people realize.

Thanks for your question, Stephanie. Really appreciate you joining the call. And our next question is going to be from Ryan MacDonald with Needham & Company.

Sorry, got hold by -- hold for muting here. Thanks for having me. So maybe first question for Peter. I'm curious, it's great to see the progress you're making, both on quality and on safety, but I thought it was interesting that you noted how the complexity of some of those implementation cycles and the adoption cycle there because there's a lot of legacy software you need to replace quite a bit. I'm curious what impact, if any, is the current macro environment having on sort of the maturity or ramp to maturity of those products, are people or customers less -- are more hesitant to sort of go into a taco replace and replace all these legacy solutions for something new?

It's interesting. In general, boom times are hard times, people can lose focus on core capabilities because they feel like there's a rush. There's a rush to a thing. There's a rush to digital trial. I can't fix up my capabilities. Otherwise, I'll be left behind. So the best time for these capabilities is actually steady times. Now in a slight downturn, and that's okay. Now if there would be an extreme like resetting downturn, that will also cause people to cut, like, gosh, I don't know what's going on. I got to stabilize the business. I can't take on any initiative. So the time right now is not like that. So it's actually a pretty good time for putting capabilities.

That's really helpful. And maybe as a follow-up...

In fact, I would specifically say better than it was 2.5 years ago because there was a bit of maybe some would say irrational exuberance at that time.

Okay. And then maybe as my follow-up. So when we think about the 8 product areas you talked about that are not sort of full maturity yet, could still have lots of opportunity for growth. How do the -- like does it deal like the one you struck with Merck accelerate sort of the adoption cycle for those and sort of path to market leadership and are there any of those 8 that you'd call out where we could be really sort of see a benefit from that Merck deal?

Yes. Well, let's talk about the Merck deal a little bit, like you need to start off at a high level, like I view that is going on in my favorite press releases at Veeva, right? That's Veeva partnering at a strategic level with the quote from the CEO with a company that's unarguably changing the world. GARDASIL that's protecting a lot of people for cancer. KEYTRUDA, every large-sized company will have an employee of that company that has a friend or relative that has probably been saved by KEYTRUDA, right? Just changing the world and changing the science. So to be -- for us to be a strategic partner of a company like that or that's a super cool thing to do and it gets everybody energized. Now what that's about, also why I'm excited is that's Merck saying, we want to optimize for my enterprise rather than departments in my enterprise. And I want to make -- I've decided I'm going with Veeva, I just want to do that efficiently. So yes, that speeds the adoption absolutely. So if you look at a product like our QC LIMS product or our randomization and trial supply management or maybe our clinical data management system or maybe our study training, the default is let's use Veeva if it's fit for purpose. So it's an accelerant and absolute accelerant.

Awesome.

It changes things a little bit too as it puts more responsibility on Veeva. So the assumption is that Veeva net products is going be great. So we have a real responsibility there versus when we started, nobody knew what Veeva was. So we had to demo that product. We had to prove it was great, prove it was great, prove beyond the shadow it out there was going to be great. So we never got into trouble to get a product into a customer when the product wasn't great. So now we have to watch ourselves, right? We have to make sure, in some cases, we will say to Merck, that product is not ready. We -- that is not ready for you. We have to be the guardian of that. But when you think about it, that is a much more efficient partnership model. That's like second marriage, right? You want complete transparency. You're working at it together right, you're in it together, you're in the boat, right? So I don't know, it's a pinnacle. It's something that I feel I've personally been working for, for 10 -- towards for 10 years now. And public benefit corporation was part of that. I don't -- of course, we don't know about other paths we didn't take, but I'm not sure we could have a deal like this with that if we're not a public benefit corporation. I'm not sure it would be possible.

Congrats on the success and we look forward to more similar announcements.

Tracking ahead of the skis here.

Thanks, Ryan. Really appreciate your time on the call. Joining us next will be Jack Wallace from Guggenheim Securities. Jack, whenever you're ready, please unmute your mic and turn on your camera. Here we are. Thanks for joining, Jack. Jack, we don't have you on audio. Jack, your audio is up.

The Zoom audio is on, but you may have your microphone off.

I think we will move to our -- Jack, I think we don't have the audio. So we're going to move to our next participant actually and see if we can get Jack back on a little bit later. So next will be Brian Peterson from Raymond James.

I think I'm on. So if you -- are you going to you can hear me? Sorry, I'm doing multiple cameras here, very sophisticated. So Peter, when you guys initially gave the $3 billion target, I remember the Analyst Day, you had talked about going from $1 billion to $3 billion that you also were going to triple the amount of employees. And I think that was sort of set in jest more than a target. But it's interesting now, right, in tech that we see -- we hear a lot about layoffs, but the cost of capital is also going up. So without even getting quantitative, I'd love to understand how you're thinking about hiring and investing in the current environment? Because clearly, it seems like that durable growth message has a target beyond '25 into '30. So I'd love to understand your investment posture, both in kind of hiring employees and then where you're really trying to invest in the platform, the platforms that Veeva's built?

Yes. When we introduced that goal in 2019, I would tell you how I explained it to the employees because the employees we wouldn't focus on the $3 billion because it's -- that's a result of doing something. You can't focus on -- focusing on $3 billion won't get you there, right? You have to focus on doing stuff to get you there. So for employees, it was 10,000 people, room to grow and still Veeva and still Veeva specifically meant still having a common culture and values, but still retaining the ability to change because that's what big companies can lose, the ability to change. So still Veeva didn't mean stuck in time. That mean still enable to change. So that's what we focused on. Now in terms of the financial goals, I thought, well, if we have 10,000 people all doing high-value things, that should be $3 billion or more. So that's my character is. Veeva is a people-based business. We need people to make products and services and things like that. So now as it gets to your -- so that makes sense like that's a key -- I would show that slide many, many times. That was our process. And when we set our 2030 goals, we'll have something else like that, like here's the 3 things.

No, understood.

Track actually. I did the math. It was never like exactly. We have to get 10,000 people. But I was doing the spreadsheet a couple of quarters ago and like, oh, this is weird. We're going to be right around 10,000 people in 2025, right? So yes. Now in terms of the hiring environment now, I will say, without getting into the details of the last quarter, we had our best hiring quarter ever in the company, both from an actual new hire and a net new hire, which means new hires net of attrition, best quarter ever. Why is that? I think it's -- there's a bit of a flight to quality, right? People -- the speculative texting is no longer that interesting and people want a great place to work with decent values to do good work. So I think we're attracting people. And more than half of those people come to us rather than we going out searching for them. And we hired this year, I think we'll hire roughly 3 -- more than 300 people directly from university. So that's another thing we do. We call this Generation Veeva. So we're growing new people that know how to work in our values and love the life sciences industry, and that's maybe our greatest gift to the life sciences industry by doing that. So yes, it's an excellent question you have. It's about talent, right? And it's a good environment now for talent.

That's great. I hope maybe this -- I don't know if this is for Brent or for Peter, but just kind of understanding like the Merck relationship, right? Obviously, that's strategic. I think everybody read that as a positive I guess, is that something that you anticipate to happen broadly across your customer base? And is that something that would then have these kind of CPI price adjustments in them after this relationship? I just -- I don't know when you can share on that, but I'd love to understand how you envision these relationships evolving over time?

Yes, I'll take that. It doesn't affect the pricing. The industry pricing is the industry pricing and the inflation. So it's not -- this relationship has nothing to do with pricing. Would we like to have these relationships at other companies? We would. But also every company is different, and we like our relationships with all the companies. So it's not some formula. This will -- I believe it will happen organically. And it just can speed the adoption is what it can do. That's what it can do. That allows us to feel better to add a little more value like our effort will be spent less on the selling cycles and more on the value creation cycle. So it feels good to us.

Thanks, Brian. Appreciate you joining the call. And our next participant -- our next question will come from Joe Vruwink from RW Baird.

Great. I wanted to ask, there's been a few products now, I think, about Site Connect or even maybe the recent CDB and clinical data where Veeva is kind of wrapping itself around the layers of the industry, different stakeholders, your peers. I guess where does customer receptiveness stands for kind of viewing Veeva as those connectivity across all these different functional aspects across stakeholders. Are you getting kind of buy-in behind some of these newer products?

Yes. We are. And I think some customers you saw the Merck example, that's a very public notion of buy-in on that. Now -- but in general, the bulk is done in the functional area. So the safety team, they want an excellent product to accomplish their super important goals of patient safety. So that's still the bulk of it. You got to be excellent in each area. You mentioned CDB, I mentioned our RTSM, randomization trial supply management. I think why we'll win there is that product will just be better than anything on the market for managing patient randomization and drug supply because of the structural way it's built. And that's what really wins at the end of the day. That's product excellence. That's 90% of it.

Okay. Okay. Great. And then just going back, Peter, to your comment about Veeva being bigger than I think a lot of maybe people expect plenty to do in pharma and biotech, but wanting to spend just a second on med tech and consumer because it does seem like the more time Veeva spends in those areas, the more you're uncovering and doing. I guess my question specifically on MedTech because we got the first set of disclosures on kind of the size of that business and expectations for it last year with some of the things you've done over the past year and I think about the CRM product, for instance, is the trajectory changing at all?

I wouldn't say the trajectory is changing. I don't have the numbers top of my mind, but I believe I gave you an estimate of where we would be for 2025. I don't think directionally, because 2025 is relatively soon now. A lot of my strategic thinking is related to 2030 now because these things are -- this is not a consumer fashion market, right? I got to think long ahead. So I don't see the trajectory changing there. I do see trajectory changing for 2030. I see some of the seeds we've planted for example, in MedTech. And I know some of the plans we have in the consumer product there is about things we haven't disclosed. So I'm very confident there. I'll just give a little example, right? We announced MedTech CRM. Well, we've been working our way in that market and adapting really good. We have a great team working on that, and we decided there we're going to go do it a little different than we've done it in other places. We really went deep into the product for about the last 9 months or so. This is a very deep product MedTech CRM. So order management specific to MedTech, inventory management, trunk inventory, all that kind of opportunity management, compliant content, right, a lot of stuff in there. And we've developed that deep in the app, and we just signed our first early adopter there. And interestingly enough, they also got at the same time, link for MedTech. Now that's with a pretty large multibillion-dollar MedTech company, but again, in a small group, right, and we got to grow there. So yes. I think we're planting the seeds, but I would say no update to our 2025 targets. So it's a pretty short term in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks for your question, Joe. I appreciate you joining the broadcast. Our next question will come from Craig Hettenbach from Morgan Stanley. Craig seem to have difficulty connecting with him. So we're going to move on to our next analyst. I see, we can bring up Jack Wallace from Guggenheim Securities, given round 2 on audio.

All right. Can you guys hear me now?

Here we are. Thanks, Jack. Appreciate you can come back and do the queue.

Excellent. Thanks for letting me back in. I just wanted to follow up on the questions around the Merck deal. Peter, you made a couple of comments last call about the strength of the R&D pipeline. I'm wondering if the Merck deal was 1 of those larger deals that you had in mind when you were making those comments, realizing that this was predominantly a commercial relationship before then.

Well, let's see, Merck did have some of our R&D and quality applications, but I won't get into the specifics of the Merck products. It just, we keep that pretty close and pretty private with our customers. So we'll keep that. I'm sorry about that, but we really wouldn't talk about the customer-specific thing in that way. I think it's just not our place to disclose those things.

Fair enough. And then there's been some discussion about price increases on the software side on this call. And then there is the call out about strategic pricing in the press release. Just trying to triangulate those 2 comments. And is that just -- is Merck getting special pricing? Or is this something that might show up in future deals?

Right. The strategic pricing there refers to making it easy to buy and consume so to make it very, very predictable. So it's not actually changing the pricing, changing the method of purchasing. Now I won't get into the customer-specific details, but that's what it's about. Rather than sometimes it would be -- we have quite a few products now, right, more than 30 products. So if you don't do these type of things, it would be okay, this group evaluates Veeva and some other companies. They might choose Veeva okay. But they can't really say I'm going with Veeva because they might be in a negotiation process with Veeva. Let's negotiate how much have they paid for this and isn't that and then how you get the purchase order and all that type of stuff that's actually not value-add to Veeva or to the customer, right? So what we're doing is -- and I won't get into the details of the process, but we want to eliminate all that nonvalue add to say Veeva and Merck, we're on the same side of the table. Pricing really sort of agreed generally how this is going to happen. And there's no discussion. We're on the same time of a table because the discussion is, is that a good fit for Merck or not? Discussions not around price because that's not a strategic thing actually, the price.

Got you. That's helpful. And then just separately, I wanted to talk about the data analytics business, just thinking about the unit economics relative to the rest of the business. And if there's going to be more of a mix of the consulting relative to some of the other revenue line items.

Yes. It's a good question in the data and analytics, how much consulting will we do related to. So I would say the real answer is we don't exactly know there. I think it may be a bit heavier in the consulting but it's high-value consulting, consulting and analytics. So this is not low-margin people work. And it certainly, it's not going to dominate our subscription business or anything like that. So -- and we have that in some of our products. Some of our products are a little more services heavy than others. This is not going to tip any kind of balance.

Thanks for your question, Jack. We appreciate you joining the broadcast. And next, we'll see if we can get Craig back on the line. Craig, please feel free to unmute and turn on your video.

Yes. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, I can hear you. Can you turn on your camera as well?

Yes. There's some issue with my camera, so I apologize for that. But I had a question, just a follow-up on the data and analytics opportunity. And just if you can provide an update of just some of your internal efforts there, how that's going? And then also to kind of maybe leave M&A into that in terms of how you view that in terms of bolt-on deals or maybe to accelerate the past?

Okay. Data analytics and [indiscernible]l sales data. There, we have our patient product in the market and we're working on fine-tuning that. So it's really about product excellence and that one is going to be a marathon, right? It's going to take a while. At this point, I actually don't see acquisitions there would help us because we're focused on real product innovation there. So Link, OpenData, Encompass, all sharing a common data model. Nobody else is -- nobody else is doing that, right? So I really don't think there's things to buy there until maybe at some time in the future when we really have product excellence, early adopters, things like that, we may buy a company where we feel like it's a better way to streamline the industry consolidate some market share or something like that. But we're on a great innovation path that I don't feel we need any acquisitions for.

I appreciate that. And then just as a follow-up on the R&D business. I think the quality piece is a little further out in time, but if you can just give maybe some signposts or things in terms of how you view overall, like which segments of R&D are seeing the most traction today? And which ones that you think will grow and scale over time?

I'm really -- we run these businesses relatively independent. We have a strong leader in the safety area, in the clinical data area, clinical operations, quality area. I'm happy with all of them. There are different life cycles. So for example, if we look at our TMF product inside clinical operations, that's far ahead in life cycle of safety. But I -- there's no -- they were all doing well. And I think that's part of Veeva, right? If there was one that wasn't doing well, we'd probably dive right in there and try to fix it. So I think they're all doing well. Sorry. I wish I could give you a more crisp answer, but that's the way it is.

Thanks, Craig. Appreciate you joining the broadcast. And our last question is coming from Tyler Radke from Citi. Craig, you're still on mute actually.

I think I double muted.

This is learning. That's our mascot is burning. This is a crouched learning. So that is actually not me, and I would be a little insulted if you are learning. All right.

We'll have to get those at the next Analyst Day.

If we do -- you're going to have to mass produced.

Got it. Well, and maybe this is a question for both you and Brent. But obviously, you've shown a really good track record of entering new markets, particularly involved with the clinical operations side. I guess I'm curious, as you think about the data side, right, going after prescription drug data. Like as you mentioned, the competitive landscape there is a lot different from what you faced on the application side, right? You have unlike kind of a very fragmented market is like on-prem point solutions. You do have a dominant vendor. So I'm just curious, how does that pathway to success look differently? And then secondly, on the margin side, what are some of the differences on margins, Brent? Is it lower incremental margins this business? Is it higher because of the potential for kind of these data as a service businesses, just help us understand kind of the key differences you're thinking about entering those markets relative to where you've been successful on the software application side.

Yes. I'll certainly take the first part now. Yes, we have a very entrenched competitor in IQVIA for Compass with an operating position and they do a lot of things to protect that, which, by the way, we feel and they're not legal. And so we have that ongoing lawsuit, which will hopefully go to trial in the next 2 years. So -- but now I would say every major market we entered, so we started out with Veeva CRM. Siebel was the dominant one there, so much so that people said, what are you doing, Veeva, attacking that behemoth, right? That's just not possible. Now I would look then in the quality area. We were the sort of commercial company, and they said, "Oh, you're going to go into the quality area. You know nothing about it. There's -- in QMS, there's this dominant player called SPARTA, they've been in there for 30 years and then the clinical data management area, how could you do that Veeva, the Medidata has been in there forever. So this is not different, right? Veeva, I think we don't want to go into a market and do an add-on. We want to be the big dog. So the only issue here with IQVIA is their monopolistic behavior that does present a bit of competition and it's going to make it a marathon. But I'm confident we just got to tip away at it. Now in terms of the margins, I'm comfortable where we're going to end up with the margins there. That's not going to be very dilutive. It might be slightly smaller than our software margins, but certainly higher than our services margins because there's a lot of core IP in that. And also if you look at, there's a lot of leverage. So we have the Crossix Data Platform, and that we can make data for multiple different Crossix, for Compass. We can get a lot of leverage that if you're a stand-alone data company, you don't have that leverage. And also, I would say, Veeva is very good at making platforms. That's where you get your leverage rather than you're buying 8 companies, you're knitting them together that's where you get your margin issues, right? You're not architecturally sound and what you're doing. Also, our -- you saw from Brent, right, 18% in product, 12% in sales and marketing. Because we have so many products, our sales and marketings can be dramatically more efficient than a stand-alone data play dramatically.

Great. And then just as a follow-up, the comments on safety, I thought were pretty interesting, especially given the top 20 pharma announcement and some of the momentum that you saw at your user conference, I guess, as you've seen other markets in Vault and the R&D side play out where you get that 1 lighthouse customer and then the rest follow. Like is there other market or category, whether it's quality that you would compare this to? And I guess, what are some of the differences we should be thinking about in terms of safety adoption relative to those others?

I would say safety is maybe the most conservative area of life sciences because of what you're dealing with. And because if your safety system doesn't operate, your pharmaceutical company can actually be shut down. You can't operate without one. So it's super, super important. Companies that are going to be conservative. Implementations are wrong. One thing to know is, let's say, our pharmaceutical CRM product. Historically, companies might start in any division or a region or a country. Safety system is not like that because the interconnected nature of health authorities, it's literally one day, the whole world goes over. So that's why -- if you talk about the stickiest of our systems ever, it may end up being our safety system. Now that's a positive, but the implementations are wrong and customers know they're making a 20-year decision when they're doing that. So that's the nature of it.

Thanks, Tyler. Really appreciate you joining the call today. And our last question, we're going to squeeze one more in. It's coming from Brad Sills of Bank of America. Brent?

Wonderful, guys. Good to see you all. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we hear you.

Okay. Good. Good. Just Peter, now looking back on the success over the last few years, you're now saying you're going to exceed that $3 billion threshold 1 year early. Looking back 3 years ago, when you set that target for 5 years, you're not going to hit it in 4 years, what would you say are kind of the sources of upside? What's gone better in your mind than expected, such that you're able to do to?

Yes. We set that target in 2019, what's gone better. I think, first off, Veeva, as you can tell, has a lot of different product areas and I was anticipating some major stumble and at least one of them. And that didn't really happen. So I think that is unexpected. It's probably not reasonable to take 6 shots on goal and to assume that they're all going to work out because it can -- there are sometimes it doesn't work out. You hire the wrong people, you make the wrong assumptions, timing, whatever it is, right? So that's probably the number one in terms of the 2025. Then in terms of the revenue target, I think there's nothing that stands out in terms of the revenue target. I would say our progress, but it's not related to the revenue target in the clinical data management area, that's actually been faster than I thought. That's the progress in the partnership is probably 1.5 years ahead of where I would have thought it would have been. That's probably the standout area. Is there any that are I think the regulatory area maybe didn't move quite as fast because that's a core, core capability area? And we had this sort of maybe irrational exuberance for a while and it took -- it actually took focus off of the regulatory area for a while into these hot areas of decentralized trials and things like that. So we're set up beautifully for success in regulatory, but there was more of a pause than I thought. So that's probably the best I can parse it out for you.

And then looking forward, you guys have been very successful with this reference selling approach build some key reference accounts and then that will kind of increase the flywheel effect in bringing in more accounts more credibility and you've executed so well over the years and in the different categories on that. If you look at those 6 categories that are in that lower left quadrant, which ones would you say you're kind of crossing that threshold where feel like you're getting there on that referenceability and you could start to see some incremental momentum from here?

Yes. Most of them because remember, even clinical operations is in that lower quadrant, but that's because it's a mix, some brand-new big applications in clinical operations, some well established. So I do feel confident in all of them. I guess, I would say the most unproven one is Compass. That's the most unproven. I feel confident, but I can't point you to specific contractual data points, all the other areas that can.

Great. Thanks, Peter. Great to see you and the team.

Yes. And by the way, great thanks for coming on everybody on video. I don't know about you, but it's more enjoyable for me if I can see the people. All right. Was that our last question?

That's correct. That's the last question, so I'll turn back to you for any closing remarks.

All right. Great. Well, thanks for everybody for joining today. I do appreciate the video format. I think it was great and lively. I appreciate the great questions and I look forward to speaking with you again on our Q3 -- sorry, Q3 earnings call. Thank you.