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

All right, everybody. We're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Brian Peterson. I'm the application software analyst at Raymond James. Very happy to have Veeva back at the conference this year. We're going to have a fireside chat. Those in the room, feel free to raise your hand, make interactive questions. We keep this pretty social. So we have Paul Shawah and Brian Van Wagener here.

Brian, I do want to start with you. Obviously, just rejoined Veeva. Would love to get some of your early takeaways or lessons learned as you've come into the CFO seat.

Yes. I appreciate the question. Nice to see everybody today. Thanks for joining us. It's a great privilege to be back. It's not so often you get to come to a familiar place with fresh eyes. So I'm learning a lot and happy being here. I think the -- I guess, 3 things I would call out that stand out to me are: one, the breadth and depth of execution. We talk about it so much because we always say execution matters most. But there are a lot of products and projects that we started several years ago in my first stint at Veeva that are really coming into fruition now. And so seeing that the quality of execution on short- and long-term time horizons, that's really stood out. I think second is the size of the opportunity. When I first joined Veeva, even I was wondering like how big is this life sciences thing really and how big can it be? And it still feels like we're in the early innings of this opportunity. Within existing product areas, we're continuing to find opportunities for new products. We're finding new product areas. So there's a lot of room left to go as we look out. And then I think third would be the people and the operating model, which really are the fuel for the first 2 things. It's taken, I think, 17 years to get to where we are now. But when you look through the roster of Veeva, the people that we have are so exceptional and work together in such an effective way that I think it would be extremely difficult to replicate. So it's great to see.

So I want to hit on the third one and the second one. But on the third one, just about the people and the hiring, like is there anything culturally in how you guys approach things and how you guys manage people because you've kind of done this twice. I'd love to maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of Veeva's culture and what you think that brings to the table?

Yes. I think we take a very disciplined approach to hiring. So there are a lot of places where we have decentralized decision-making. Hiring is not one of them. Hiring, we have like a very structured, very rigorous process that folks go through. And we're very clear on some of the things that we look for. People that are fast learners and hard workers and team players; easy words to say, very hard to find at scale in a company of our size. And then I think the second is not just the individuals that we bring in, but the way that we have them working together. So we call that our operating model, and that's about a 5-page document. It's hard to make it only 5 pages that lays out our vision and values that explains those things in depth that talks about every area of the company, how they work, how they work together, that talks about our ways of working. And so when people come into Veeva, they become part of it very quickly because the culture around that is so strong. And there's also a lot of clarity on what it means to be a Veevan.

Sorry, Paul, certainly, you're going to weigh in. But just in terms of some of the opportunities and still being in the early innings, is there anything that's really exciting for you now that we should be paying attention to maybe over the next couple of years?

Several areas, Brian. So we've got some very large areas that we're just dipping our toes into now. So we've talked a lot about Compass, which is our data business. We've been pursuing that for a few years. But Compass, that is a very large market that we're just starting off into within quality, which has been an important part of the Veeva results for the last several years. LIMS is a huge new area. So there's a lot going on there. And then on the clinical side, we talk a lot about EDC and CDMS and some of our legacy products in eTMF and CTMS, but RTSM kind of quietly is our largest single product area opportunity. So there's a lot of these things that are still very early. They're going to take many years to play out in some of these markets where we're just getting started.

And Paul, maybe one for you. Just on the Vault CRM transition. I know you have 4 of the top 20, I would love to get some of the feedback in terms of what customers are saying and where are you in those efforts?

Yes. I mean CRM is doing really well. We're executing really across all areas on the product. We just had the latest -- our latest release of our product is the most advanced CRM that we've ever shipped. We have a very strong innovation road map that's coming up in front of us. We just had some big announcements in AI. So we announced things like CRM Bot and voice control. So I'm excited about that product direction. Also, we just released our -- with the release this week, in fact, of Campaign Manager, we now have Campaign Manager Service Center and CRM. So sales, marketing and medical for the first time all built together in a single vault. This has never been done before of having those functions together in a single database. So this is a first for the industry, and we think a big advantage in terms of getting -- our customers to customer centricity. So going well from a product perspective. From a commitment perspective, you're right, we just had our fourth Top 20 commitment. So we're excited about that. We had -- we're certainly in deep discussions with all of the rest of top 20. So that continues. We do expect to win the vast majority, but we certainly don't expect to win every customer. In fact, we were just recently made aware that one didn't go our way. They're going to go with -- they're going to do something custom with Salesforce. Certainly, this is going to be a very long-term project that will play out over a period of time. This may not work out well for Salesforce. They don't have a product yet. We think that -- we don't think that customers are going to follow this sort of approach like most large customers won't take this sort of custom approach. But we do think that we're going to continue to win the vast majority of customers. We may have the opportunity to win this customer back. So we're focused on delivering a customer success and these kinds of things will happen. And in terms of timing, you asked about, I think most of the migration decisions will be made mainly through the end of 2026. So yes, we feel -- generally we feel really good about where the market is.

And so what do you think are some of the key factors that kind of go into that decision in terms of Veeva or Salesforce? And when you have discussions with some of these customers, like what are they really pressing on? Is it a certain product feature? Or I just love to understand that a bit more.

Yes. Different companies make decisions for different reasons. Some of the early customers that have already made announcements already, they're focused on innovation. They want and appreciate our innovation road map and where that's headed. They want to minimize disruption. Some have said -- you even heard them in the public domain talking about how CRM is a solved problem. They want to focus on innovating in new areas. And then certainly, other customers may optimize or think about different things, right? They may want more of a custom build kind of project, a custom build approach. In this particular example, it looks more like a -- more likely like a custom build on Salesforce. And we've certainly seen these kinds of things happen before, right? We've seen customers go down the path even with -- in recent history with IQVIA trying to do something custom. These are very difficult and long projects. This particular one will likely play out through 2029. So certainly, a lot can happen there in between now and then. But every customer is different and sometimes there's account-specific situations that push a customer in one direction versus another.

And Paul, just following up here. As we think about the unification of sales, service, marketing, why has pharma or large pharma kind of been late to that effort? And what do you think that you can do in terms of having these all integrated on [ Vaults here ].

Yes, it's a good question. And the history of enterprise software for these commercial systems has always been -- it's always been very fragmented inside of life sciences, but also outside of life sciences, right? Companies talk about all of these pieces, a Sales cloud, a Marketing Cloud, but they're actually separate, right? They -- some through acquisition, they cobbled them together. So that's existed for a long time outside of life sciences just as well. Now in our industry, we were the leader in the CRM space. We are the leader in the CRM space. And then there were other -- we couldn't do the marketing space. We couldn't do the service space. And moving to Vault gives us this unconstrained road map, this ability to be able to innovate in a very new and a very different way. There's no technical restrictions. There's no contractual restrictions. We can do what we need. So it's that -- this decision that we made 2 years ago unlock the potential to deliver on putting sales, marketing, medical service all into a single database. So that's why we're so excited about it. When we made this decision, it was about innovation, and now we're delivering on it. I'm excited that we just -- we announced these products a year ago, and we've released on them. We're delivering on our vision here.

For us -- sorry, Brian, that was a contractual limitation. But when you look out, it's actually not -- like Paul touched on, it's not really something that's solved outside of life sciences. Like the separation of Sales Cloud from Marketing Cloud is woven very deeply in the Salesforce platform and other CRM platforms. So it's a pretty novel and innovative thing that we're doing. And this is, as Paul said, the first time that any industry has had it all in one database.

And so how do we think about that transitioning to growth? I know you gave the $2 billion commercial target. Like how do we think about the key incremental revenue drivers as we look to that 2030 target of $2 billion?

Yes. So that growth to $2 billion in commercial by 2030, just a reminder, that's both subscription and services. I'd say the main growth drivers in that period of time are Crossix, Link and Compass, some of our data products. Those are all still in fairly early days, all entering that steep part of their growth curve. Those are going to be the main drivers of growth. We expect to continue to see some growth in CRM and in commercial content. Those are the main drivers. The other part of what we're obviously doing going out through 2030 is these Vault CRM migrations. And so that will be a key part of what we're executing on as a team. That doesn't show up as much in the growth story out through 2030, but it's a really important part of laying the framework for the next phase of CRM suite growth. There's those 3 products that Paul touched on, Campaign Manager, Service Center, patient CRM. Those are not the end of the line for Commercial Cloud and for CRM suite. That's very much the beginning of a reigniting of growth opportunity within commercial. So those migrations are important not just for the revenue tied to those CRM accounts, but also for the growth that they unlock in new products going forward.

Maybe pivoting to R&D here. EDC gets a lot of product momentum or discussion with investors. Talk about where you are? And what is your core advantage versus some of the incumbents there?

Yes. The EDC space is also another market where we've executed very well. We have a highly differentiated and modern product. So some of the advantages are helping to speed the clinical trials process, right, building the study, handling and managing changes that happen in a study. They're called migrations. We don't actually have to do a migration because of the way that we built our product, whereas legacy systems would have to do that. So the biggest part of the value proposition is running the trial more efficiently, and we can do that. We've proven that over and over. I mean now we have 8 top 20s who've committed to EDC. And then beyond EDC, remember, it's not just about that one core application area, we're building suites of applications. So the clinical suite of application. It ties into things like RTSM and the clinical trial management system and all of these other applications, eCOA, software and applications that touch the patients that participate in the trial. So we're delivering excellence in EDC, but we're also delivering a broad suite of applications, and that creates an additional level of value for our customers. So I'm really excited about where we're going. It's a broad suite of applications, and we're executing well there.

And that speed part is so important, right? Because you think about yourself as a life sciences company, you have a limited window of patent exclusivity on a product. So if we can take your trial and cut out 1 month, 3 months, 6 months of each of the trials on the path to launching that, that's a significant revenue opportunity that we're helping them to protect. So the value story in EDC around speed, in particular, is so strong alongside all those other benefits Paul talked about, about integration with the broader platform.

And maybe just looking at suites broadly across R&D, like are you finding that large customers are looking to purchase more of a suite than they were a few years ago? I know you have more products in each of those areas, but maybe talk about how customers are looking to buy versus maybe a few years ago?

Yes. It is a natural evolution that we're seeing. So remember, we have a common platform. It's Vault Platform, built very specifically for life sciences. And then we have suites of products built on top of that, regulatory, quality, safety, clinical. And we build for excellence in the suites, but we also build for connectivity across those suites. So the more products that we create in those suites, the more value that our customers get, the more senior we're able to have this conversation about transformation and modernization inside of these companies. So when you start to talk about what Brian mentioned, impacting the overall drug development life cycle, right, not solving a specific application problem, but a really, really bigger problem, significant transformation, that's what's driving these conversations more towards going more all in, thinking more strategically, making the purchasing and the buying process more efficient and having these road maps where they ultimately are driving towards getting to a very efficient landscape all powered on the Vault Platform. So yes, incrementally today versus 2 years ago and certainly 5 years ago, those conversations are more common and more frequent.

And as we head into calendar year '25, how do you think about the pipeline of R&D deals? Where does that stand versus maybe a year ago?

It's a broad-based suite of applications. It's broad-based across a number of areas. So there's a lot to be excited about, and each is in a little bit of a different space. So we called out safety as an example. We have 3 top 20s on safety, and we're executing against those well. And we're in the early part of the market, whereas in EDC, we're a little bit later in the market, 8 top 20s. There's still a lot in front of us. And then you get to some of our more mature products when you talk about things like clinical trial management as an example. So there's a lot of these areas. There's a lot to be excited about. I think I can call out a lot of different things. I'll call out one in the clinical space, which maybe is underappreciated or people don't fully understand what it is, and it's Site Connect, right? So we have software for the sponsors and then there's software for the clinical research sites that participate in a trial, and we're going to connect them together. That's highly unique, right? The value proposition that we provide is beyond creating efficiency for the sponsor inside of their 4 walls. It's about creating connectivity with some of those most important partners, in this case, research sites. So I think you'll see -- you start to see over the next couple of years, starting this coming year, but even beyond in areas that are really creating interesting connectivity across the key stakeholders in the industry.

And so maybe, Brian, putting some numbers behind that. I know you laid out a $4 billion target for R&D. Like is that -- how should we be thinking about the incremental revenue growth drivers there?

Yes. So R&D, as with commercial, still both subscription and services. I think what stands out when you look at R&D is how broad-based it is. And we spent a lot of time in the run-up to Investor Day thinking about can we just point to 2 or 3 products, but you can't. It's very broad-based across our product suites. It's in clin ops, it's in clin data, it's in quality, it's in regulatory, it's in safety. And so we feel very confident in the portfolio of products that we've got and in our overall product strategy and the readiness of those products for the market. We talk a lot about product excellence being the main driver for Veeva and for our reference selling model, and I think we're seeing that in all of those areas.

And just -- so we got the $4 billion and the $2 billion adding to $6 billion. Like how do we think about kind of the arc of that growth rate as we go to 2030? And anything you want to unpack in terms of the subscription versus services?

Yes. So on the subs versus services, we expect subscription -- the overall growth rate of 13%, we expect subscription to be more like 14% and for services to be high single digits, maybe slightly different dynamics between R&D and commercial underneath services. In subscriptions, R&D, as we just talked about, is a little bit higher growth driver, higher growth rate than commercial. And we're feeling really good and really confident about that as we look out. We built that model out to 2030, not as a top-down model. We built a bottom-up in each product area. So looking at who are our customers today, what's the backlog of opportunity, what's the pipeline momentum for the next couple of years for each of the top 50s, what do we think is coming. And so it's a pretty robust process as we look out. Of course, some areas will underperform, some areas will overperform. Some elements of timing will be lumpier than we expect. That's sort of to be expected when you have a long-range target. But we're feeling really confident about the path to get there.

And maybe just talk about kind of the growth versus margin balance. I know you have the floor set at 35%. What are your key investment priorities today?

Yes. We've always thought about growth and profit together. I think it's something that distinguished Veeva in the early days, and it went out of fashion in the market for a little while there, and maybe it's coming back in fashion right now. I don't really know. But we think about those together and kind of inseparable from each other. I think sometimes you see companies throw money at an opportunity or throw money at a problem thinking, that's going to accelerate it. That's going to get me there. And I think what we find is that lean teams go faster. And so we always think about taking a disciplined approach to our spending. And so you're seeing that in some of our margin results right now. Our Q3 margins were at 43.5% non-GAAP, and that's well above the floor of 35% that you mentioned. And we're going to continue to keep that disciplined approach. We've chosen not to give a long-term margin guidance. So we're going to continue to not do that, but we will provide annual margin guidance each year. So we'll have our FY '26 view coming up in March.

So you mentioned at the Analyst Day, the intent is to build kind of a horizontal application starting with the platform. Maybe talk about the strategic rationale behind that and where you think you have the opportunity to add value?

Yes. It's something we announced very, very early. We took the approach of just being very, very transparent. It's relatively, to Brian's point, lean teams. It's a very focused investment that we're making with a lean team that's focused on taking a platform-first approach with the ultimate intent that it's focused on approaching horizontal enterprise applications. So platform first means we're going to build out a great platform, and then we're going to decide which specific application areas we go after. So super early, optimizing for transparency. It's not something that you're certainly not going to see any results on this for some time, and we'll get into more specifics in terms of which areas we focus on, which customer segments as time goes on.

And I know you mentioned maybe M&A could be something that you would look at there. How do you think about the build versus buy, especially as you're looking at more of a horizontal opportunity?

Yes. I think I'd break that down into 2 sides. There's the life sciences side of the house where we're not primarily focused on M&A. That doesn't mean we wouldn't do something. But if we did, I think you would expect that to be something small and more about a tuck-in for product excellence or customer success and less about kind of revenue or entering a new area. So life sciences, maybe something small if we did it. We have talked about potential M&A in the new markets area, but there's no specific plans there at this time because, as Paul said, we're still so early in building the platform that we haven't selected the specific markets to enter. So there's no specific plans around M&A in new markets. But as we figure out which areas are we going into, if we think that M&A can accelerate our entry into that area successfully, then that's something we would certainly look at. I think if we did, you'd see us continue to take a very disciplined approach. We've got a very strong track record and a high hit rate on M&A, and it's because we don't go out and buy revenue. We look for companies that have very high-quality products that have very high-quality customer relationships that have really strong talent, that have a culture that's aligned with Veeva. And that's a pretty high bar to find.

And maybe just thinking about the cash on the balance sheet, if you take a step back in terms of capital deployment more broadly, is M&A the priority? How are you thinking about maybe putting the balance sheet to work over the next few years?

Yes. I would say in the immediate term, it's the option for M&A. It's still, again, too early to know, but those can be one-way types of decisions. So we're going to be patient and take the time to really learn what new markets it is and the right way to enter it. So I don't think we expect to make any changes to our capital allocation strategy for the next year. but it's going to continue to be an active conversation that I'm having with Peter and the Board.

And Paul, I wanted to ask you, Crossix is something that you've mentioned that has done better pretty consistently over the course of the year. What's driving that? And how are you thinking about the growth rate for that business?

Yes. So Crossix, you're right, has done well. And I would call out a couple of things. One is, to some extent, the market has come back, particularly compared to 1 year ago. So the market has rebounded a bit. But I think the bigger piece is we are having share gains. We've made a lot of investments in the Crossix product, both on the measurement side and then what we call Crossix audiences. And it's very clearly the best product in the marketplace. So we're taking share from competitors. We're taking share from kind of custom homegrown tools where they buy data and they try to build it on their own. We're clearly a better product there. So I think we're seeing the impact of both of those. And Crossix will be a growth contributor for us over time. We're still in relatively early days there.

Like it's funny a couple of years ago, we were talking about headcount in life sciences and how that was transitioning. How are some of the customers thinking about that digital motion versus kind of headcount motion? Where are we in that evolution?

I think we've hit a steady state there, right? So we saw a lot of that fluctuation play out over the last roughly 3 years. And we always anticipated there would be more of the shift from a purely a nearly purely in-person sale, very heavy focus, heavy spend there to more of a digital, and it's played out a little bit faster because of the whole market environment with COVID, and we saw that play out, and we called it out very, very clearly. I think we've hit a new steady state, right? The industry is operating in a more kind of a normal operating environment. I think you'll continue to see companies expand their sales teams or contract their sales teams. That always happens. That's normal course of business in life sciences. But on average, I expect the size of the sales organizations to be relatively stable over the next couple of years.

Maybe just unpacking some of the areas on the R&D side where you think there's a big opportunity. Like what are your existing customers doing there in a product like safety? Are there some incumbents? Or how do you feel about the competitive positioning in some of those markets?

Yes. So safety is an area that's been dominated by 2 legacy providers, one that got acquired by a larger company, use case Oracle, and then one is more of an independent player, both kind of legacy on-premise type systems, trying to make the move to the cloud. We all know that, that's a very difficult transition to go from on-premise to cloud-based computing. But it's also a -- so the competitive environment, it's not as strong. It's a very old legacy model, but these are also systems that are very sticky, right? Once you get that safety system in place, you actually don't want to touch it a whole lot until the pain of maintaining and supporting and upgrading becomes so great that it's actually better to move. So there's a lot of conservatism in that space. So as time goes on, those systems get older and our product has matured. And now our product is very mature, and we've added now a suite of products around the core safety area. So it used to be just safety and then we added safety docs. And now we have products around signal detection, being able to look at data outside of the industry and draw comparisons and try to predict the safety events and also analyzing and looking at your own internal company data. So the suite of products, the maturity of the product offering has all come to create this kind of perfect storm that will play out over a number of years, right? I don't want to kind of over-index on how fast it's going to go, but we're executing well there. I feel good about that market. It feels like we're at a nice inflection point.

And just maybe thinking about the various opportunities with AI. I think there's a lot of different use cases. But where do you see the early ones? And where are your customers in terms of kind of embracing AI in that evolution?

Yes. I'm excited about kind of our AI strategy and how we're kind of putting that to work across different areas of our portfolio. We started a couple of years ago in areas in R&D, like trial master file, TMF Bot and RIM, the RIM Bot. So we've built very specific apps into our products, and that's worked very, very well. Our strategy broadly is build applications where we can create unique value, enable our customers through technology, making our data accessible. We have a direct data API and then also enabling a broader partner ecosystem. We have many, many partners now who work very closely with us to make sure their AI works very closely with all of our Vault applications. So that's the strategy we're executing against. We just had a couple of recent announcements. I was at our European Commercial Summit where we announced MLR Bot, which is for the content approval process, using AI to make that process more efficient. Before you spend dollars on expensive people, the machine will highlight where -- some things that they can do to get that content to a better state. That will be a product that we license. And then -- so that's one example of solving a specific process. And then another is in CRM. CRM, we announced CRM Bot and we announced voice control, both of which use AI. The CRM Bot is a little unique in that it's our customers' large language models. MLR Bot, we're building and using our own and CRM Bot, it's bring your own model. Now why? Because a lot of companies think of that as their differentiation. They want something that they can own and train and that's unique and specific to them, and we're going to embrace that strategy. So our AI strategy is very nuanced based on the process that we're trying to solve. It's not a blunt one size fits all. It's very much nuanced based on the process and how we can best create value for each customer.

And last one for me. Just as you guys think about the overall environment for pharma, I know there's a lot of debate around regulatory, IT demand. Like what is kind of the current state of the union in terms of the customer base?

Yes. So it's been -- the demand environment has been relatively stable. The macro environment is relatively unchanged. We called out how customers have been adjusting to this new normal. So we've seen that adjustments take place. A lot of the things that have been a little bit more of a distraction over -- a lot has happened in the last 12 months, but that have been somewhat more of a distraction, right? AI was a distraction for some period of time, just mind share-wise, the elections, the global environment, all of these things, customers are just operating in more of a normal environment. It's the new normal. So things have stabilized out. And we're executing well, and our customers are focused on just putting these mission-critical systems in place. These are projects that they know they have to do. They plan them out over long periods of time. So I expect that's where things will continue to go. It just is focused on strong execution.

Great. We are out of time. Brian, Paul, thanks so much.

Thanks, Brian.

Thanks, Brian.