Veeva Systems at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth Path

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Veeva Systems (NYSE:VEEV) participated in the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, outlining its strategic initiatives and future goals. The company, which specializes in software solutions for the life sciences sector, discussed its ambitions to double its revenue run rate by 2030 while navigating macroeconomic challenges. Veeva’s commitment to maintaining a lean and innovative business model was a focal point, alongside plans for expansion into new markets.

Key Takeaways

• Veeva aims to increase its revenue run rate from $3 billion to $6 billion by 2030.
• The company is focused on migrating CRM customers to its Vault CRM and expanding into horizontal CRM markets.
• Veeva’s subscription-based model provides stability amidst macroeconomic uncertainties.
• A strategic partnership with Beringer Ingelheim is set to enhance R&D applications.
• The company holds $6 billion in cash and investments for potential M&A activities.

Financial Results

• Achieved a $3 billion revenue run rate, meeting the 2025 goal set in 2019.
• Targets a $6 billion revenue run rate by 2030, implying a 13% annual growth rate.
• Reported a 46% non-GAAP operating margin in Q1, with a forecast of 44% for the year.
• Veeva maintains profitability as a core principle since its early days.

Operational Updates

• Offers over 50 products across 8 suites, exclusively for the life sciences industry.
• Revenue is evenly split between R&D and commercial segments.
• Competitors include IQVIA, particularly in the data cloud space.
• 80 customers have adopted Vault CRM, with plans to reach 200 next year.
• 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies have implemented or are using Veeva’s eTMF.

Future Outlook

• Veeva is targeting market leadership across all product areas in the life sciences sector.
• AI applications are expected to boost efficiency and productivity, with a potential 15% increase in industry effectiveness.
• Plans to enter the horizontal CRM market as a growth engine beyond 2030.
• Capital allocation is focused on M&A to support entry into new markets.

Q&A Highlights

• The migration to Vault CRM was partly due to Salesforce’s competitive moves.
• Veeva is actively working to reclaim customers who have standardized on Salesforce CRM.
• Customer testimonials are crucial for driving sales, as demonstrated at the commercial summit.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Awesome.

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Good. Oh,

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: yep. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate, your time and attention here. My name is Dylan Becker. I’m the research analyst here, at William Blair that covers Viva Systems.

We have the CFO, Brian with us today. For all of the necessary disclosures with today’s presentation, you can find those at at WilliamBlair.com. But, Brian, thank you for joining us.

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Thanks for having us.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: There’s there’s varying levels of familiarity in the audience today. Obviously, Veeva has been a very successful business for for quite a long time. But could you kinda help us level set the conversation, lay of the land, how Veeva and where Veeva was started, the problems you’re looking to solve, and how you think about kind of the life sciences ecosystem?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. Absolutely. So, Veeva was founded in 2007 by Peter Gassner, still our CEO, originally as a vertical CRM company. So we were built on the Salesforce platform selling CRM, initially to life sciences. And the thesis for the the business at that time had been sell CRM into several different industry verticals.

Over time, that evolved into the business as we have now, which is a vertically driven software business. So we’re we’re one of the few vertical software companies. Instead of selling one or a few products to all companies, all industries, we focus really exclusively on on one industry, today, which is the life sciences industry and have a little over 50 products across eight different suites. So it’s a pretty wide business. We were very proud in the the past fiscal quarter to cross our 2025 goal that we set, about six years ago in 2019 for a $3,000,000,000 revenue run rate.

Our goal now is to cross $6,000,000,000 in revenue run rate by 2030, so about five years from today, and, a pretty wide and and large growth story.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And to your point, that’s been evident, for some time now. As we think about maybe the industry before we kinda get into the singular products from a business perspective as well too, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market today, and there’s a handful of things that are specific to the life sciences ecosystem. Could you help us maybe kinda level set the expectations of what you’re seeing and hearing and kind of the puts and takes that are going on in the broader life sciences space?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. It’s certainly, I mean, a complicated time. I’m sure you’re all feeling it too, trying to make sense of exactly where we’re at and where we’re going. Our customers in life sciences are also feeling that. It’s a capital intensive business.

It’s a business that’s accustomed to thinking in long range investment cycles. And so what what we’re feeling is some of that uncertainty and the general unease that comes with uncertainty in a business that’s used to making long range decisions. That said, that dynamic, while it may be a little bit heightened right now, it’s not new for the life sciences industry. Post COVID, there’s been quite a lot of macro disruption in this space. And so we’ve seen over the last couple of years is customers not necessarily resolve the macro uncertainty, but get more comfortable and confident navigating within it.

So at this time for us, our our business has, you know, been so far relatively insulated from some of the effects of that. Part of that’s the nature of the business. It’s largely subscription based. And so in the short term, it’s more it’s less sensitive rather. And then part of that’s the industry continuing to operate and make decisions as usual.

And and maybe if

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: we were to think about it in the context of kinda your strategic partnership approach and to your point, some of the long duration types of decisions, how mission critical your solutions are, we’ll get into kind of the components there shortly. But how do you think about those pillars kinda driving some of that broader resiliency and how customers think of Veeva as an enabler of their ability to navigate some of this?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. No. That’s that’s exactly right. So in addition to being subscription based, a lot of our applications really the substantial part of our business is in mission critical areas that our customers have to have. So you have to have a CRM if you’re a pharmaceutical company.

You have to have an e t m eTMF system for your clinical trials. You have to have an EDC system to take the data in from your clinical trials. So they’re not really discretionary purchases. When there are times of macro uncertainty, and we we’ve certainly gone through several of them in our history, what we tend to find is that impacts the timing of demand, but it it ultimately comes back because customers still need to do those projects.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And maybe if we drill into it, right, there’s two segments. There’s largely the commercial and the r and d segments of the house. But if we stick, stick to the commercial side, could you kinda walk us through the core pillars of CRM, cross x, kind of the data cloud, and the components and maybe interoperability of each?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. So the two major sides of our business, as you touched on, are the commercial side. So that’s, really centered around CRM as the original product, but a number of products in commercial and then the r and d side of the house, which is clinical trials, regulatory management, safety, and pharmacovigilance, a number of different suites and applications. They’re about fiftyfifty. I think last year we crossed the milestone where r and d was slightly larger, but roughly fiftyfifty within the business.

Within the commercial side of the house, about half of that half of the business is our CRM suite, and then the other half is a range of other products. So a commercial content product, which deals with regulated content for the life sciences industry, our Crossix business, which you can think of as marketing analytics that helps them make better, higher precision marketing investments, and then our data cloud, which is a number of data products. And that’s a pretty wide business. As as you can imagine, life sciences has a lot of different data needs from what is the address or the phone number my sales team is calling. That’s our reference data business to, what is the actual prescription volume going through each of those doctors, and how do I use that to segment and target and prioritize where my reps are going.

That’s our Compass business to the marketing analytics business and Crossix. So it’s it’s pretty wide wide business.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: And if we we think about kind of, to your point, the most recent quarterly outperformance too, and maybe for some time now, data and and Crossix in particular has been big contributors to some of that momentum as well too. Could you walk through maybe the specific capabilities and the differentiation that you can provide in that market versus maybe the traditional manner of working?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. So our our Crossix business, the marketing analytics side, and then our data cloud are both founded on the same technology platform. And those are that’s the original Crossix business. So we acquired Crossix about five and a half years ago, very differentiated capability called SafeMind that allows us to target individual therapeutic conditions and demographics at a highly precise level, but in a way that’s appropriately anonymous for the health care setting that health care and life sciences works in. And so we’ve seen growth in both of those business.

Data cloud competes primarily with IQVIA. That’s a very large, mature business that has a long runway for growth. And the Crossix business, the marketing analytics side, has been the more recent driver of outperformance for us and was a key contributor to a pretty strong q one print. The Crossix side around marketing analytics has two major components. One, we call measurement or sometimes measurements and optimization, and that’s about helping our pharmaceutical companies understand where their spend is going, how effective it is at reaching their target segments, and how to adjust their media spend to more effectively reach their targets.

Second is the audiences business, and that’s, that was actually the main driver of our outperformance in q one even though it’s the smaller part of our cross six business. The audiences business is a usage based product that’s delivered through pro programmatic advertising channels. So you can think about digital advertising, connected TV, and we’ve constructed a number of segments that are purpose built for life sciences. So if they’re trying to reach people with a specific therapeutic condition or a specific therapeutic condition and a specific demographic, they’re able to do that in a very precise way.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: And then maybe the last pillar of the commercial suite, on the CRM side of the house, right? That’s where the business was started. The business was founded. We’ve now progressed and are migrating customers over to the Vault CRM, side of the equation. Could you kind of maybe walk us through what led to that decision in and of itself and how we should think about Vault CRM versus traditional Viva CRM?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah, it’s a big transition year for us and a couple of years coming up. So we announced a couple of years ago that we were migrating our CRM customers off of the Salesforce platform that we’ve, historically been built on top of. We called that product Viva CRM and that we’re moving them over to Vault CRM. So there, you know, is kind of a lengthy decision process that we’re taking customers through now. We hope to migrate, you know, all of those customers over to Vault CRM between now and, September of twenty thirty when our relationship with Salesforce formally ends.

Salesforce in parallel has built a competing product off of what was a competitor several years ago. IQVIA’s OCE business was sold to Salesforce. They’re building their own CRM there. And so we’re we’re out both talking with customers and rolling up our sleeves. We we’re proud to have our fifth top 20, that we announced today commit to Vault CRM as their CRM going forward.

So we’ve got five that have decided to, continue to standardize on Viva within the top 22 that have made the decision to go with Salesforce. We’re certainly disappointed with that, but, continuing to work to try to win those back over time. Those are lengthy migrations and ones that we we don’t ultimately think are going to be successful. And then there are a number of decisions still in the air, and we’re expecting those decisions to be made between now and the end

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: of next year. And as you think about that decisioning cycle, we now have more customers live. I think it was 80 that are live year to date relative to maybe a small handful last year, and the plan is to have 200 live. Next year, how do you think about referenceability and and what you’ve seen kind of in a pattern recognition motion with the rest of the Veeva platform that can help with that decision in cadence as we kind of reach that ’20 late 2020s to 2030 time span?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. When you work within one industry, that reference selling motion is really important. So our customers are our best marketing and sales tool. We had our commercial summit here in North America a few weeks ago and spoke to the fact that eighty eighty customers had had already gone live on Vault CRM and that we expected 200 to go live by this time next year. I think the power in that is is showing it to people.

And so they’re hearing from their peers that are now live on this and seeing what it looks like, seeing live demos of the software. We don’t see the same from Salesforce yet, so they’re projected to have their first early adopter product, I think, available in September, October. So we’re we’re all waiting to see what that looks like. But as we get into next year, we’re expecting to have three top twenties live on our product, including our AI module, called CRM bots. So we’re we’re really excited about the progress that we’re making.

Our expectation coming into this year had been to win the vast majority of those decisions in the top 20 as well as in the rest of the the pharmaceutical segment, and, we continue to expect that.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: And and maybe it’s a good segue, to the Vault platform and what you do on the r and d side of the equation. We’ve talked about kind of the commercial aspect of once a drug is in market. You talk to us about the components and pillars of the r and d suite and how you can make that process more efficient?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah so the the r and d suite started gosh thirteen years ago I guess 2012 we announced the first product there which is eTMF in the clinical operations side of the house. And this quarter, we announced that 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies have now selected or gone live on eTMF, and we’re expecting the the final one in the top 20 to to select us sometime this year. So we’re, you know, very encouraged, excited, and and honored by that. I think that’s a lot of trust that the industry is putting, into us to innovate and continue to move the industry forward. The full r and d suite is now five different suites, clinical operations, clinical data, regulatory, safety.

So they’re a pretty broad range of applications, 30 in total across those suites. And ultimately, our goal is to be the industry leader in in every one of the applications that we’ve built.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: And and to your point, as those platforms have matured and there are some that are that are more mature than others that are in market today, how should we think about that opportunity for broader kind of standardization from an end to end perspective to help with that acceleration and cleansing of the data to to commercialization?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. You know, our our goal in in these these products is for each of them individually to be the best product in its area and then for them to all work together as an integrated suite of applications so you can have end to end workflows across clinical, across regulatory, across safety, across your quality and manufacturing that work together seamlessly. Part of the way that we do that is we have a common data architecture that our whole Vault platform is built on. And it’s, you know, we think over time going to become the industry standard, for their data model. And so there’s things that we can do as we start to enter that market leadership position that really help drive the efficiency of the whole industry.

We talk about our vision as being building the industry cloud for life sciences, and that’s distinct from building a lot of applications for life sciences. We want to have a whole suite of things that work together to help them operate more efficiently as an industry and and bring great therapies to market faster. Do the competitive dynamics shift between kind of

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: the commercial and the r and d segment? Maybe walk through kind of the purchasing mechanism between those two pools from a buyer perspective.

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. What’s a little bit unique about Veeva is there there’s not a single other competitor that we go against across all of our areas. It’s a number of competitors. So we just talked about what was IQVIA is now Salesforce on the CRM side. In our data business, it’s IQVIA who has been the incumbent for a long time in the data space.

In clinical data, it’s Medidata, which is a larger company that’s now owned by Dassault. It’s a series of smaller competitors in quality that are more horizontal focused on manufacturing or in safety that are niche providers. So there’s not another company that we think about that’s pulling together an integrated vision, at a platform level, but it’s a number of different competitors in each of those areas.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: And you talked about the platform standardization from a data perspective you’re also facilitating a lot of those mission critical workflows as we touched on how do you think about those two components and pillars kind of working together to enable AI automation kind of what an agentic landscape maybe looks like for Veeva?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. It’s it’s certainly an area we’re really excited about. I I would say we took a bit more pragmatic approach in the first couple years of of AI. There was a lot of noise and a lot of hype, but not ultimately a ton of delivery of successful AI in life sciences. I would attribute that to a couple things.

You know, one is that the industry itself is pretty heavily regulated. There’s not a lot of room for AI hallucinations in a highly regulated business. And the second is that the privacy and security framework was not really ready for that level of enterprise. We’ve seen both of those things start to shift. And so we we get very excited about our position as, you know, a system of record and the ability to build really powerful AI applications that make our customers more effective.

Our CEO, Peter, in the the q one earnings call spoke to kind of a long range vision of being able to perhaps help this industry be 15% more effective. And when you think about the size of the life sciences industry, that would be a pretty monumental impact to have. It’ll be a long road till there, but we’re we’re working very hard on our AI road map and execution against that and have our first couple products launching this year.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And and and maybe if we think about now that kind of the aggregate view between both the commercial and the RMT suites, how do you guys characterize kinda the overall landscape, the overall opportunity, the penetration against what you view from a TAM perspective, and how to think about the pillars of the growth outlook?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. So the TAM that we’ve spoken about historically is roughly a $20,000,000,000 TAM in life sciences. We’re at about a $3,000,000,000 run rate right now, so that leaves quite a lot of room, we think, to continue to to grow into the market. Our goal, as I mentioned, is to be the market leader in every one of our products. So the the market is there for us to grow into.

We are very excited and confident as well in our path to those 2,030 targets of $6,000,000,000 in revenue. That implies when you work back, about 13% revenue growth per year, in a business that’s, you know, quite large now. So we’re very excited about the long term prospects for the company and that there’s a really strong engine for growth going forward.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Maybe if we flip it to the profitability side of the equation too, I think a big pillar for Veeva has always been that dual combination profitability and sustained organic growth. Where do you think about kind of the steady state margin profile of being sitting in today versus the levers that you maybe have as you continue to invest to capitalize on the growth opportunities?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah, I think as you said the combination of growth and profit has always been in the DNA of Veeva. We’ve been profitable for a very long time back to the early venture funding days of Veeva. So we don’t view profit and growth as being enemies of each other.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: We think

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: that efficiency and lean teams are the way to accelerate innovation and drive growth ultimately. We were very proud to be at a 46% non GAAP operating margin in Q1. Guidance for the year is for 44%. So we run a pretty efficient business. We don’t think about providing long range margin targets largely because each year we take stock of what’s what’s the right way to grow the business, and then we provide that margin guidance annually.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: And maybe from an investment perspective, if we’re thinking about kind of the maturation of some of those newer products that are coming to market, what excites you most against some of those kind of incremental opportunities within R and D? Maybe how do you leverage that relationship you have with customers to be acute in your targeting and development?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. You know, I think what I get excited about the business is it’s when I joined Veeva originally in 2017, it was 15 products, and now it’s now it’s 50. And so that is a tremendous amount of growth. And there there are not many companies that are great at working in a multi product environment. I think we’ve built a culture and an operating model that are uniquely effective there.

And so it’s always tricky when we’re up on a stage like this or talking about the business because I’d love to be able to say, here’s the one thing to look at or the two things to look at. But there’s not two things to look at. We have a number of different products that are very large, that are growing quickly, that have a long runway for growth. And what I get excited about is the quality of the teams and the execution that I see broadly across that opportunity.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And we’ve talked a lot about the software side of the house. Maybe if we kind of flip it to the services side, could you give us a sense of again maybe the services mix in the business what’s valuable as you guys see kind of from a services angle here

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: yeah so services have been an important part of the Viva story as they are for all software companies We are a little bit unique in that we think about that as also being a profitable business. So if you look at our services business, it tends to run at pretty compelling margins. We have a couple different sides of that. One is our professional services group, which is implementations, managed services, things that are more directly tied to our software and subscription business. That’s a fairly stable business, and we don’t expect a significant amount of growth on that out to 2030.

You see the attach rate on services generally go down as you are growing your subscription base. Where we see a lot of opportunity for growth is in our business consulting segment. And so our our vision is to have software, data, and consulting all working together. That business consulting team is still relatively early in its journey and as we look out is the major driver of services growth that we see out through 02/1930.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Within that business services segment can you give us kind of an additional layer under the onion of kind of what the projects that those teams are working on, how you’re kinda helping maybe from a pure process change perspective with Veeva’s technology,

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: there’s new ways of driving efficiency within organizations. Yeah. There are a lot of different forms of that. So it can range on the commercial side from very detailed commercial analytics projects, mining their data for insights. It can be working with them to think about how to evolve their marketing capabilities or to develop integrated campaigns across marketing and sales.

On the r and d side there’s a lot of work around business process redesign and so it’s pretty common to see customers as they’re undertaking a new implementation also think about how do I modernize my process and make that look different. So it’s it’s a range of things and and our goal there is to provide you know, really pragmatic, fast time to impact consulting that helps them work more efficiently.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And and we’ve started to see, I think, that validation from a market perspective as well too. I think there are a handful of the top 20 customers that are kinda seeing Veeva as my strategic industry partner going forward. Can you talk to the value of having the full end to end capabilities of the platform and what that can mean from a strategic vendor approach consolidation opportunity, as what is kind of typically very disparate kind of connected ecosystems?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. It’s certainly, you know, something we aspire to, and it it will never most likely be the majority of customers that work in that way. But, you know, a couple years ago, we announced a strategic partnership with Beringer Ingelheim BI who decided to go really all in on Veeva across all of our applications on the r and d side. And that was tremendous sort of confidence in the product and what we’re building and the way they see their business evolving within that. We’ve had a number of other strategic relationships like that.

We announced one at the conclusion of our q four cycle for a customer that had chosen all of our clinical products in one fell swoop. And so whether customers are buying applications individually or buying them as part of an integrated multi year program, I think what we are starting to see take shape is, again, that vision of the industry cloud and a whole bunch of products that used to be siloed and their workflows working together in a more effective way.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Maybe if we’re Maybe to switch to an idea that I think you guys brought about maybe at last year’s Analyst Day, but the topic around moving into the horizontal application space, and I think more recently talking about moving into horizontal CRM. A lot of the opportunity sitting kinda beyond 2030, but how do you think investors should be thinking about kind of Viva’s aspirations moving into the horizontal market?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Well, it’s the very early days. I spent the whole time here so far talking about our our focus on a vertical segment, which is life sciences, and and then now we’ve recently announced that we’re also gonna be pursuing horizontal software with, the CRM area as the first place that we’re starting. I think about this as the third act of Veeva. Act one was CRM. Act two was the expansion into life sciences more broadly in r and d with the development of the Vault platform and all the applications on that.

And this is the third act and, I think, another engine for growth that we see going forward. So as Veeva grows, you know, you’ll see us continue to focus on the life sciences market. We’ve got a very, you know, mature and capable team helping to continue to drive growth there. And then we have a lean team right now working on this new markets area. We announced it in November, had started it right around that time.

We’re expecting to have our first customer live later this year. So they’re they’re working at the speed of a start up, which is really exciting. It will take time before that becomes a material enough part of the business to be talking about its revenue profile, its cost profile. So we’re we’re still in those early days of building the platform, building the product, getting out to customers, but should be an important part of the story as we look out, as you said, beyond 2030.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Right. Yeah. It’s an additive lever to what is already, as we’ve kinda discussed today, to a significant opportunity within the life sciences ecosystem. You also are unique in your, I guess, now a handful of years ago transition into a public benefit corporation, the ability to kinda lean into from an industry perspective of of delivering value to end consumers in that context. Can you maybe talk about kinda what led to that aspiration and and how that’s resonating just given the importance of the end market you serve?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. So it’s kind of a long time coming, frankly. When you play it back, it’s so obvious in retrospect, but sometimes it takes time to emerge. You know, we had always thought about Veeva as being a company that wasn’t all about the money, that there was an important part of what we do that is creating great jobs for our employees, being a great contributor to the communities that we’re in, but then helping this industry that we’re serving. And when you go talk to Vivints, I think that’s what you would get is that very visceral sense that, you know, we’re proud to be part of the mission that our customers have to help patients.

And we view a big part of our role as helping get those therapies to market faster and more efficiently. So we converted to being a public benefit corporation officially a few years ago. It’s something that I think has really resonated on two fronts. One is with customers. We used to get questions like why should I put all my eggs in the Viva basket?

What should give me confidence in doing that? And we get those from time to time, but, gosh, the volume has gone way down on that. I think they see it demonstrated in the way that we work with them and partner with them, but also, you know, legally, the way that we’re chartered and the obligation that our board has. And then the second is in recruiting. I think we see a lot of folks that get really excited to come be part of that mission, and you you can feel it when you’re when you’re inside the company.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And and maybe we buried the lead with this one as well too, but you’ve now been back at the business for a little over a year. You were you were a part of Viva operation maybe five or six years or so ago prior to that. Could you kind of help us, understand the attractiveness? Obviously, you’re very passionate about the business as that’s clear.

What brought you back, to to, to the seat today and how you think about kind of the broader opportunity ahead?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. I’ve I’ve got certainly a winding path into this role. If you were gonna pick the conventional road, it wouldn’t be mine. I started at Veeva in 2017 originally as our CEO’s chief of staff, and then I led our sales operations or go to market operations team for for about five and a half years, which is great. So I’ve seen a lot of the guts of the business from the inside as as an operator.

I left for, about eighteen months. Went to a company called BetterUp and then returned in, July of last year. So I’m not quite at a year yet, but coming up on my my second one year vivaversary. You know, I think for me, it’s a lot of things we just talked to about the PBC resonate with me personally. It’s a great it’s a great business.

As CFO, it’s easy to say that. It’s a great profitable, high growth business that I’m proud to be part of. But it’s a great team, a great culture, a great industry that we serve, a mission that I’m proud to come in and and work against every day and contribute to however I can.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: And and maybe to that point, and we talked about this a little bit last night as well too, but, your positioning and your kind of prior role at the firm or at the company, having seen kind of all of those seeds planted that are now, taking shape and taking form and really resonating from a market perspective. Could you maybe kinda help us level set the investments that you guys are making today and how that kinda correlates with with your prior past experiences at the business?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: You know, it’s it’s funny. We got a lot of folks that asked us questions following q one because our CEO had made the comment it was our best q one ever, and I think folks thought he was referring to the print. And I know for certain the only thing he was not talking about was the actual financial results of q one because what he meant was all the things that we started working on or that we advanced in q one were were the best q one we had. You know, we announced these these goals to to grow revenue to 6,000,000,000 run rate in 2030 just a few months ago. And at the time, I would say that was a little bit of a scary goal is when we had conviction in, but, you know, we’re leading the Viva team as much as we’re communicating to you all and as investors.

And so there was a lot that has to happen to hit that 6,000,000,000 goal, a lot that we feel confident in, but a lot that we’ve got to execute against. And what we saw was the whole Viva team really execute at an extraordinary level in q one. And so that’s existing products and existing sales cycles getting moving. It’s the speed that the new markets team got going on building the platform and selecting their first entry point. It’s products that are in their early adopter phase that are having really great customer go lives happen.

So it’s it’s many things that have to come together in a company like ours, and it gives us the confidence, you know, looking out that that the future is bright and that the growth engine remains really strong.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And we’ve talked about the financial components of the business too, but you do have a healthy cash balance that that you guys are are looking to, potentially utilize. How do you think about capital deployments from the CFO seat? Right? You’re generating 40 at a 3,000,000,000 scale with 5,000,000,000 today.

How should investors think about kind of your prioritization from a capital allocation perspective?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: Yeah. So it’s certainly a healthy cash producing business given both the growth rate and the margin profile. We have about $6,000,000,000 in cash right now, cash investments. And so the primary use of cash that we’ve contemplated for this year is for M and A to support that new market’s entry. We’re gonna continue to be very disciplined in the way that we think about M and A.

We’re quite proud of our M and A record. I think we’ve got a a 1,000 batting average so far, and I don’t think anybody wants to lose that. So we’re gonna be very disciplined. It would have to be a company with a great product, great financials, great leadership team, good Viva cultural fit, right price for us. We’re pretty frugal.

So a lot has to go right for that to happen, but that’s the primary use of capital that we’ve contemplated for this year. We get a lot of questions about other forms of capital return, and I think certainly that’s something we’ll consider at the right time. But for this year, we’re really focused on new markets.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Sure. And maybe as a kind of way to to wrap the conversation here, Brian, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Right? And there’s a lot of irons in the fire to your point, 50 products across the portfolio. What excites you most as we kinda think about the next three, five, maybe even beyond the kind of 2030 type of vision, for the story and and really kinda what’s ahead for Veeva here?

Brian, CFO, Veeva Systems: You know, a lot of the things that we’ve we’ve touched on, it’s, what keeps me awake is sustaining the culture and the operating model. That’s that’s really the secret sauce for for Veeva. It’s it’s more of a bottom up company than a top down company because it’s so wide. So I get excited to see the momentum that we’re having on Crossix and that that got to be the highlight that we talked about in q one. A couple quarters before, we were talking about EDC and the progress that we’re making in EDC.

I think in a couple more quarters, we’ll be continuing to talk about CRM and all the top 20 decisions. And so, you know, it feels like every quarter we get to highlight a different area of the Viva team that’s working because there’s there’s so much great execution that’s happening. That gives me a lot of confidence as a CFO too because there’s not one thing that this business is hinging on. It’s a it’s a portfolio level business, and that that creates opportunity, but it also derisks it. So for me, the the biggest thing that I think about that could go wrong would be if we lose that operating model, and that’s that’s what I’m most protective of, but but also what I’m most excited and and proud of.

Dylan Becker, Research Analyst, William Blair: Certainly. Well, fantastic, Brian. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you.

We will be carrying on the conversation upstairs in the

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.