Veeva Systems - Earnings Call - Q3 2026

Transcript

Speaker 6

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Colby, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Veeva Systems Fiscal 2026 third quarter results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise, and after the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question at any time, simply press star one again. I'd now like to turn the call over to Gunnar Hansen, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 2

Good afternoon. Welcome to Veeva's Fiscal 2026 third quarter earnings conference call for the quarter ended October 31, 2025. As a reminder, we posted prepared remarks on Veeva's Investor Relations website just after 1:00 P.M. Pacific today. We hope you have had a chance to read them before the call. Today's call will be used primarily for Q&A. With me today for Q&A are Peter Gassner, our Chief Executive Officer; Paul Shawah, EVP Strategy; and Brian Van Wagner, our Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements regarding trends, our strategies, and the anticipated performance of the business, including guidance regarding future financial results. These forward-looking statements will be based on our current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially.

Please refer to the risks listed in our earnings release and the risk factors included in our most recent filing on Form 10-Q. Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today, November 20th, 2025, based on the facts available to us today. If this call is replayed or viewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Veeva disclaimed any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. We may discuss our guidance on today's call, but we will not provide any further guidance or updates on our performance during the quarter unless we do so in a public forum. On the call, we may 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 on today's earnings release and in the supplemental investor presentation, both of which are available on our website. With that, thank you for joining us, and I'll turn the call over to Peter.

Speaker 7

Thank you, Gunnar, and welcome everyone to the call. We had an excellent Q3 with strength across the business and results above our guidance. Total revenue in the quarter was $811 million, and non-GAAP operating income was $365 million. Veeva AI is a major initiative for Veeva, and we're making excellent progress. We think Veeva AI can be significant for customers, the industry, and Veeva. We're also executing well and delivering significant innovation across all product areas, including Vault CRM, Crossix, clinical, and safety. We'll now open up the call to your questions.

Speaker 6

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and enter the queue. If you'd like to withdraw your question at any time, simply press star one again. Your first question comes from Alina Sukhotkalia with Barclays. Your line is open.

Speaker 8

Okay, great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here, and I appreciate the prepared remarks that were posted. Brian, maybe I'd love to start with you and maybe just hit one of the points in the prepared remarks kind of head-on where I think we said that 14 top 20 customers are expected to migrate to Vault CRM, and so six are potentially opting for other solutions. Now, there's clearly the potential for win-back, as we said, but maybe the first question is, how do you sort of think about the size of the revenue that might be at risk from those six customers on the CRM side, and how do you think about the timeline of that potentially kind of transitioning?

Speaker 2

Hey, Sokhit. I'm not going to size it, and there is the potential for win-back, as you said, but maybe taking a step back, CRM is about 20% of total revenue today, down from about 25% two years ago, and that's because other product areas have been growing. In the shorter term, these are multi-year projects that we understand will take a long time to execute, so no impact expected this year and likely nothing material for next year either. Longer term, we don't expect any impact on our 2030 goals. It's a diverse business, and that means there's a lot of paths to get there, and we're still on track.

Speaker 6

Got it. Got it. That's super helpful, actually. Peter, maybe for you, on the other side of the business, I'd love to talk about R&D a little bit with you. Of course, one of your competitors talked about winning back a top 20 on the EDC side. I was wondering, just since we're all together, can you just talk about that and maybe just comment on kind of the state of the union in that EDC market in terms of the competitive landscape and your pipeline for further market share gains?

Speaker 7

Yeah. We did have one customer that said they were going to go back to their previous provider. Now, they're still a broad clinical customer for us and even in the EDC area, so we'll just have to see how that goes. That's not a trend I see. I think we're still trending very well in clinical, and we have a number of opportunities in the pipeline for EDC, both with large sponsors and with CROs because most customers are looking for an integrated solution across clinical operations and clinical data because it just makes sense. That's how you drive efficiency, and efficiency is the name of the game. This particular customer has more of an integrated architecture of their own. For example, they have a custom CTMS solution and a variety of other things.

At this point, it was sort of more a decision that was something that we don't see repeating in other places. Also, the thing that I'm very excited about is our innovation in clinical, our next-generation innovation in clinical that we have in the kitchen that will help the life sciences companies bridge between sponsors and all the way out into clinical research sites and also really help in patient recruiting over time. The future is very bright in clinical. This one, honestly, a bit of an aberration.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from the line of Joe Vruwink with Baird. Your line is open.

Speaker 4

Hi, great. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to dig a bit more into the CRM topic. Obviously, attrition carries an implication on revenue over time, but I sit here today and I think commercial subscription revenues have been raised by about $60 million year to date, and then every Vault CRM customer you're retaining now has the opportunity to add Service Center and marketing automation and Veeva AI. So how should we think about all of that netting together? I mean, is it the case where ultimately you're netting out and there's an increment here? I think the market is focusing on kind of a loss value to Sokhit's question, but how to think about the offsets in the equation over the next five years?

Speaker 7

Yeah. Hey, Joe. You're absolutely right. I think there's been a lot of focus on what there is to lose. I think there's a lot of potential in what we've created, the innovation that we've delivered in some of the areas that you mentioned, like Service Center and marketing and Patient CRM and some of the new products, but then also in AI. Yes, each customer that we retain, we have the potential to sell a lot of these products and new innovations, and I expect that over time those customers will adopt more broadly the CRM suite, all the add-ons that are part of that. We're starting to see some of that happen already with some of the customers who've committed to Vault CRM starting to add additional products on. That's really good.

I think we'll also have the potential to win some of these customers back. We've talked about that in detail. Yeah, I feel good about the upside as much as there is some potential attrition for some of the customers that decided to do something different.

Yeah. This is Peter. I'll just add in we've focused on the top 20 because that's how we do some things when we talk to the financial community, but it is important to remember we have about 400 customers, so it's pretty distributed in what we do. Our CRM business is very healthy, and our win rate and our conversion rate is very strong and stronger in the smaller market because the smaller customers, they don't have this appetite for a custom build. It's just not the risk they want to take or what they want to do, and they get a lot of other products from Veeva. Also, just on a side note, while we did have 20 of the top 20 customers, 20 of the top 20 were our customers in some fashion for CRM, two of them were mainly IQVIA customers.

It is not to say that we're not going to gain some new customers here, right? And that can be significant as well. Bottom line is what you should take away is CRM business is healthy, and it is an important part of Veeva, but it's not the major, it's not the largest part of Veeva anymore. That's for sure.

Speaker 4

Okay. That's great, Colby. Thank you both. Maybe one on Veeva AI. You had a few summits within the last quarter. I think you've also been making the rounds on forums, gathering feedback from your customers. I guess what stood out to you both in terms of, I'll say, positive reception, but then also maybe any pushback or things where you walk away and you have more you need to work on coming out of this initial experience with AI?

Speaker 7

I think our customers, they're looking for practical solutions now, right? They're looking for solutions that can add value rapidly, sort of getting out of this experimentation phase. They want to use partners where partners can help them. They want to use Microsoft where Microsoft can help them. They want to use Anthropic where Anthropic can help them. They know where Veeva can help them is helping to automate industry-specific applications with AI, that deep domain knowledge and the business process consulting around it. How do you enable insight generation in CRM through your field team by the use of compliant free text? Okay, that's a very specific thing. How do you dramatically increase the efficiency of safety case processing for adverse events? Okay, that's very specific. That's what they're looking to us for, and that's what we deliver.

That's what we specialize in terms of what they would like differently, just like everybody else. Can this be robust and proven and working tomorrow for all cases? They just want us to go faster, but there's really rampant alignment on directions. Veeva is setting out to do exactly what they want Veeva to do. We just have to get there, and the customers also have to be able to adopt and do that change management work, which is not easy either. That's not going to happen overnight. One of our advantages is we have a great business consulting team. We have that integrated together, our product team, our selling team, and our business consulting team to deliver AI value. That's going to be more holistic than others, and that's how you're going to have to do it in industry-specific solutions.

The customers are not going to want to knit together consulting over here and software over there and AI over here. They're not going to want to do that over the long term.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from a line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Thanks for taking the question. Peter, maybe a follow-up to your last answer, but as we think about AI and how that will impact your products going forward, do you think that we'll see more of a monetization in terms of commercial where we've already kind of seen some aspects of that today, maybe more broadly in software? I'm curious, what do you think that opportunity could be in R&D where there seems to be more of an opportunity of innovation? Any color on how to think about that opportunity from AI?

Speaker 7

I think it'll be not exactly, but broadly even across the board. With some areas, a bit more than others. Safety, I think it's a big opportunity to reduce the amount of labor needed also in certain areas of the clinical. In commercial, it's more about insight generation and market advantage in terms of faster insights. In regulatory, it's about speed. The value is probably similar across all areas, but the way it's going to be implemented is differently. Some is going to focus on insight and agility. Some is going to focus on, "Hey, humans don't need to do that particular work anymore.

Speaker 9

Maybe, Paul, a follow-up for you. I think there's been some debate broadly on AI and how that may impact sales reps or how efficient sales reps could be. As you talk to some of your customers, how are they thinking about the size of their sales force with the implementation of AI? What do you think that looks like going forward? Thanks, guys.

Speaker 6

Yeah. I mean, we have seen some of the reductions that have played out over the past couple of years that we have talked about. We kind of predicted roughly about 10%. It ended up being a little bit less than that. The way to think about it is the customers that they're calling on, the HCPs, number of doctors, hasn't fundamentally changed. You still need people. You need a base level of sales reps to build those relationships, cover those doctors, deliver the information, the service that they need. I think the industry is cautious and thoughtful about making significant changes or adjustments. I think there is a lot of potential for productivity gains and effectiveness gains, but I think it will likely be stable, at least for the next couple of years. We're not hearing of any AI-related reductions.

It's more related to specific ramping up for launches or ramping down because of a pipeline challenge, but I think that's a normal course of business. Your next question comes from a line of Alexi Gogolis with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Speaker 0

Hello, everyone. Thank you for letting me ask a question. Peter, I have my first question. Maybe I appreciate the comments you made in prepared remarks that you have not observed material change to customer buying behaviors, but could you double-click on the demand environment and the financial health of a pharma end market?

Speaker 7

Yeah. The industry overall is pretty healthy. We've had a bit of chaos in the political environment with tariffs and other things and certainly conflicts, but the industry has gotten, I guess, used to that. I'm seeing no changes in the end market. The science is still rapidly evolving, right? There are many, many uncured diseases that are seriously affecting people's quality of life. And the death of a child or a young parent, right? That happens. The industry is working hard to be able to cure some of those things. There's demand for that. I'm pretty optimistic about the industry overall, and it's pretty steady right now.

Speaker 0

Thank you, Peter. A very quick follow-up on the comments. First, congrats with another commitment for Vault CRM. You suggested that you're looking to win another four out of the remaining six undecided. Do you have any verbal indications from those clients already?

Speaker 7

No. I wouldn't get, we'll probably let you know. When we've been notified, we'll let you know in general, but we won't get into the fine-tune of that. Okay. We have some things that we think, and we have some things that we think we think, but we won't get any more fine-grained than that.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from a line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Thanks for taking my question. This first one for Paul. Crossix again called out as a pocket of strength. Any way to help put a little context around it? Was that consistent with Q2? Is it starting to normalize, level off? How should we think about the kind of the Crossix dynamic?

Speaker 6

Yeah. It was in line with our expectations. You've seen nice outperformance of Crossix in the first couple of quarters of the year, and we expected that to continue to play out. The measurement business is very stable, and we've continued to perform well there. Audiences, which can be a little bit more variable, have also delivered really nicely. Yeah, Crossix continues to be a nice growth driver, and we expect it to be that. Although there may be some variability, we expect that to be a nice driver over the next several years.

Speaker 9

Perfect. Brian, 115 customers live on Vault CRM, including some top 20s kind of in the motions. How should we think about when you might see some gross margin tailwind as you start to work off of the Salesforce royalties? What's the right timeframe for something like that?

Speaker 2

Yeah. There are some puts and takes in the short to midterm there can. Recall that in the next couple of years, as we have other customers going through their migration, there are some customers where we have both the Veeva CRM on Salesforce royalties and the AWS hosting costs. We will see some customers rolling off, some that have a mix. I would say a modest headwind actually over the next year or two, but pretty immaterial in the grand scheme of things. You can see that the gross margins on subscriptions were essentially stable, slightly up year over year. It is not a significant impact over the next couple of years, and then it starts to roll off a few years from now.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Stan Berenshteyn with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Speaker 0

Yes, thanks for taking my questions. First, a follow-up on Crossix. I'm just curious, given the regulatory focus on direct-to-consumer advertising, have you seen any changes in where audience targeting is happening on the platforms? Is it changing at all?

Speaker 7

Stan?

Speaker 6

Yeah. I would say.

Speaker 7

I can take—yeah, I'll take that one, Paul. I think the thing that when I was listening about Crossix, the thing to know is that digital overall, digital marketing spending is going up both in consumer and in HCP because there's better digital avenues to reach people. You're seeing that with things like OpenEvidence and Doximity's new AI offering, right? There's increasing effective use of that channel. With Crossix, specifically, what's going on is as that channel gets more important, measurement and audiences and optimization get more and more important. That's one thing. Crossix is becoming more of a standard. There's really a compounding effect of the excellence that we're developing in Crossix. Crossix will be—that's going to be a well-growing business for us.

You should think of that as a well-growing business for the foreseeable future, three, four, five years type of thing. We've put some serious innovation in Crossix over the past years. We've invested heavily in the data network because that's a data network that we share with Compass. Compass and Crossix share that data network. Digital is becoming more important, not less important. You will see maybe regulations around consumer TV ads, but overall, digital is growing. It's a very effective means to meet people, and you need to measure and optimize that. That's what Crossix does.

Speaker 0

Very helpful. Thank you. Maybe a quick follow-up on your sales pipeline. I'm curious, a couple of comments here. First, I think historically, Peter, you've called out safety and regulatory as potentially having a little bit less of a predictable sales cycle, maybe a bit longer than usual. Any changes there from customers in the sales pipeline on those products? Maybe related to this, I'm just curious, are you seeing anything coming from IQVIA Partnership? Any clients potentially coming through that pipeline? Thanks.

Speaker 7

Yeah. For safety and regulatory, they are, especially in the large companies, those are usually long sales cycles. Customers know they're making 10-year decisions plus. These are very serious ones. I don't see any change there. We have a lot of momentum in the safety area. That's one thing I would say. The AI and safety can kind of be a game changer as well. That might drive a little faster adoption there. In terms of IQVIA, it's been great having that partnership. Revenue impact takes a while to see on these partnerships, but the positive customer experience is really heartening. I think it's giving IQVIA a little spring in their step, this partnership with Veeva. It's certainly giving Veeva a spring in our step, this partnership with IQVIA. It's a very positive macro-level trend for the business, especially on the commercial side.

Two big macro-level positive trends for us on the commercial side are, three, are this increasing investment in digital and AI. You'll see Crossix taking advantage of that, and you'll see other things from Veeva over the time, right, where a lot of our revenue and our future things will come as it relates to digital. The IQVIA partnership, making the interop more easier. That will help our data business. That will help our software business. The freedom that we're getting to develop our solutions without having to worry about the Salesforce platform and the limitations. All of these things are really going to be unleashing us on the commercial side. For IQVIA on the clinical side, that's been great too. Just more customer confidence in Veeva and IQVIA can bring solutions to our joint customers.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from a line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Hey, gentlemen. Appreciate it. Maybe, Peter, starting with you too, if we kind of think about the service strength, you hinted at this as it relates to business consulting, but maybe the need for change management that you're seeing and kind of the strong services outlook, how you maybe think about the implications of that maybe driving more kind of wall-to-wall, broad-based platform adoption in the future, the role that business consulting can play in driving kind of the broader platform momentum over time, whether that's commercial or R&D.

Speaker 7

Yeah. If you look at Veeva at a very high level, where we started, pharmaceutical CRM built on Salesforce, myself and my neighbor in our front yard, in our front yards, which we joined. So there's two people and one product, right? Now we have 7,000 people and a lot of products. Now we have software that basically reports directly to me. We have a data business that reports to me, and we have a consulting business. That consulting business reports to me. That is how we're building the industry cloud for life sciences. These three things working together, which is a lot of skills we have and capabilities we have to have in Veeva. We have to be an excellent consulting company. We have to be an excellent data company. We have to be an excellent software company.

We have to manage the interplay of those three things. That is what our customers want. They would rather have Veeva be the general contractor and fit this together. Sometimes I would talk to customers, and I would say, "Well, if Veeva has 100 things, the nice thing is you might buy one thing today, but you can be assured that that one thing five years from now will fit into all the other Veeva things that you have." Versus if you buy 100 things from 100 different vendors, those 100 things are moving in 100 different directions, and you'll be replacing pieces and parts forever. That is what we are bringing, a more comprehensive solution across data, software, and the consulting, the operating models, so that it fits together for life sciences. I guess that is why I think sometimes people underestimate what we will end up doing for life sciences.

It's a pretty significant thing, and it's not anything that any other vendor has actually ever tried to do for an industry so far. That's why we're pretty excited about what we're doing.

Speaker 9

Certainly. That makes sense. Maybe you just kind of teased this, and so I'd be remiss if I didn't kind of double-click on the momentum in safety. I know you called out another top 20 customer, and I think another top 20 go live there alongside the fact that it's maybe the opportunity that's most ripe for labor disruption. I know these are still long-term decisions, but how you think about kind of the innovation you're delivering to the safety space and how that's met with receptivity from a decisioning perspective as you have kind of more of these proof points and validation points at market? Thank you.

Speaker 7

I think safety, people are really excited about our architecture and how we're doing things. Not only the core safety processing, but the AI that sits on top of that and the analytics that go along with it, the analytical application. People think that's good. People are very hesitant to change their safety systems. It's such a core system, and it's been so complex. We're still in the early customer phase of that. I'm hopeful that we'll get into the middle majority phase here in a couple of years, and then we'll have the late adopter phase. I'm just very optimistic on it, but gosh, people don't change these things very fast. They just don't. Because it's such a critical area, and there's not a lot of push from above the safety teams because it's such a critical area, and they've got it.

We just have to wait for the right time, and then every project has to be successful. That's really what we're focused on. It would be surprising to many people how complex a global drug safety system is when you're coordinating with all the health authorities around the world, all the constantly changing regulations. I mean, just to give you an example, there's a lot of special functionality for vaccines that you need and over-the-counter medicines. Each therapeutic area has its own things, and each country has its own things. It's complex. We've spent, I guess, it's getting close to, what, eight years or so building this thing now. That's a real competitive moat.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Tyler Ratke with Citi. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Yeah. Thank you very much for taking the question. Peter, just going back to the top CRM, top 20 customers there, you referenced that this was kind of unique customer, kind of one-off example. I was wondering if you could just sort of elaborate on it. Is this something specific to their negotiations or discounts that they'd be getting with another vendor? If you could just sort of talk through that and then maybe the timeframe on when you think you could win them back.

Speaker 7

Yeah. I think when we say customer-specific situations in a very large company, there will be individual people, and there'll be dynamics in between people. And there'll be how those people feel and where their cultural alignment is. Sometimes logic is only part of it. That is what I was referring to. There is no particular pattern there. It is just customer-specific humans, right? Some would just say, "I just want to try something new," right? "I just want to try something new." We may think that is logical or not logical, right? Some people want to go with something that is proven, and some people would, "I just want to try something new." You have got all those kind of dynamics going on. In terms of the win-backs, you never know when that happens. Usually, it comes with, honestly, executive turnover, right? There is an executive turnover.

Somebody has a different idea. Also, it can come sometimes vendor not delivering, the current solution not delivering or project failure. It can come in a hurry. It might come in one year. It might come in 10 years. In general, these will be more of a custom-build type of thing with Salesforce. On the outside, those could have a 10-year lifespan, but they might only have a one-year lifespan. Just have to see how that goes. I do have a lot of confidence that the custom building is really it hasn't proven to be the way forward for most things over the years. That is what gives me a lot of comfort. I do not want to over-index on that. We are just talking about these top 20s for transparency. Our CRM business is very healthy.

We're winning some top 20s that we didn't have. We're losing some that we had, and we may win them back. Overall, the business is good.

Speaker 9

Yeah. For sure, over 100 customers live is a good proof point. Maybe, Brian, just on the margin side, it looks like hiring ticked up again a little bit this quarter relative to kind of the trends we saw last year. Help us just understand where those heads are focused, and then anything you would call out in terms of how to think about margin expansion into next year.

Speaker 2

Yeah, absolutely. The two main areas that we're hiring are in our product and then in our services team. You heard us speak to some of the services hiring coming out of Q2 with the large class for our college development program. We're continuing to invest in the services business, both core professional services and business consulting, continuing to invest in the product. There was some impact on the services margin in particular in this quarter, but we're really pleased with the overall performance of the business. As those new hires start to ramp and build a project, that will wind itself down over time.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from a line of Charles Rhyee with TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Speaker 0

Oh, yeah. Thanks for taking the question. Peter, obviously, we're continuing to get these wins in Development Cloud with startups and study training. For these clients, I guess in Development Cloud, among the top 20 biopharma, what's the average number of Veeva Development Cloud products do they have on average? Where would you see is the tipping point? Because if I recall, a couple of years back, there was an announcement that Merck was going to move to sort of a full Veeva environment over time. Just trying to get a sense on what you would consider someone being sort of a full Veeva on the development and on the R&D side. What does that look like?

Speaker 7

Yeah. As it relates to Merck, there was a strategic partnership we announced. There was not really that they would use Veeva everywhere, but a strategic partnership that we announced. Now, in terms of Development Cloud, I do not have any particular figures to share with you in terms of percentages or number of applications. It depends on area. In the eCTMF area, we actually have 20 out of the top 20 now that have selected us. That is really important. We can use that standardization to drive AI and industry standardization and help the industry and help the regulators. That is going on there. In the newer areas such as RTSM for the randomization and trial supply management, we do not have any top 20 that have selected us for an enterprise standard yet or an eCOA. Nobody yet because those are quite new and safety just a few.

It just depends. We have definitely more opportunities to go in Development Cloud than we've consumed now. Surprisingly, it's still in the early days of Development Cloud for two reasons. One is these are super important systems that take time. You can't change them out all at once. You put them in, most of them, and you keep them for 15 years. The other is we're adding more applications. RTSM is new. eCOA is new. The whole area of quality control LIMS is brand new. We just had our first early adopter in the top 20 for two manufacturing sites. It's a lot more to do. I guess it's still early, surprisingly. These things take time.

Speaker 0

That's helpful. Thank you. Maybe just to follow up there, someone had asked earlier about one of your competitors kind of won back an EDC client. What does the overall competitive landscape look like currently? It seems like one of your other main competitors in development in R&D seems to be focused a little bit elsewhere in healthcare. Just curious how you're seeing the overall competitive landscape kind of shaping up currently. Thanks.

Speaker 7

Yeah. We certainly have competitors in each area. There's competitors specific to randomization and trial supply management. There's competitors specific to regulatory and clinical operations and EDC. We don't really have a competitor that's trying to do an overall development cloud like we're doing. I feel like we just have to execute really well, excellence in each area, concentrate on our integrations, and leverage our account partnerships. We have to compete with ourselves to push ourselves for excellence, for humbleness, for great hiring. The advantage that we have is we have a core platform that's used across all these applications. We can really invest in the platform. There's commonality in the platform. We have first mover advantage. We had this idea back in really 2012. You have a lot of core capabilities around it.

If you are competitors as ourselves, we have to execute and continue to improve and stay humble.

Speaker 6

Ladies and gentlemen, due to time allotted for questions, we please ask to limit yourself to one question. Thank you. Your next question comes from a line of Craig Hettenbach with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Speaker 3

Yes. Thank you. On Crossix, before the acceleration this year, I think the business has grown roughly kind of low to mid-teens. You talked about some of the drivers that are driving growth above that. Do you think in the next couple of years it reverts back to kind of that mid-teens level, or do you think some of these drivers can kind of sustain stronger growth in the next few years?

Speaker 2

Hey, Craig. This is Brian. Overall, we are really pleased with the progress of Crossix. Growth has been very healthy there for the full year to date. It's a large market with a long runway for growth, both in the measurement business and in the audience's business. We're not going to break out a specific long-range growth rate for each product area, but we think there's still plenty of room for that business to grow, and it's executing very well right now.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from a line of David Hines with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the question. Paul, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you're balancing go-to-market initiatives on the commercial side of the business and maybe how you see it evolving over time. I mean, obviously, Crossix is doing really well. Half the things CRM migration is kind of front and center of your mind right now, especially as kind of these last top 20s make their decision. You've tempered expectations around cross-sell during this migration period, but you have a ton of new product, right? Service Center, Campaign Manager, Patient CRM. When do you lean in on those products a little bit more with the top 20s? Just maybe talk about kind of how you balance all this and see it evolving over time.

Speaker 0

Yeah, David, it's a good question. Maybe higher level, we have dedicated teams in each of these areas, dedicated strategy teams and product teams, and they're all focused on their different areas. They're able to move to advance the product forward, advance customer discussions forward. In some cases, there's dedicated sales teams. We don't necessarily have to kind of just focus on one thing and not focus on something else. We're able to kind of focus in multiple areas. You're correct, right? The migration thing is the transition of customers over to Vault CRM. That is creating, in some cases, it's slowing things down. In other cases, it's actually creating opportunities for us. We're seeing as customers are making that decision, they're looking at their data.

Maybe it's time that we switch out our customer reference data because Veeva has better data in this area or their master data management with Network and Nitro are now becoming opportunities. As they're going through the migration, they're thinking more broadly because they're trying to get to broader efficiencies, and they're able to get there as they adopt more pieces of commercial cloud. We're able to focus in multiple areas. It does create openings for us to continue to expand in each of these areas. As you've heard, there's kind of some stable businesses, and there's other areas that are growing a little bit faster. We're going to continue to drive and push in each area because we can add a lot of value when they put all these pieces together.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from a line of Andrew DeGasbury with BNP Paribas. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask the top 20 CRM question in a different way, in particular how it relates to your 2030 targets. I know you mentioned that it doesn't impact your capability to reach it. I was just wondering, why is that the case? Is it because either the sort of lower expectations is mostly tied to a very small number of clients that have decided to go a different way, like one or two, or is it a factor of that you have these other Vault CRM customers that are smaller, the 100-plus that you've listed? It could be also contributing and offsetting some of that potential weakness you would see in that business.

Speaker 2

Hey, Andrew, this is Brian. I'll take this one. When you step back, there are a few things, some of which you touched on. One is that the top 20 is certainly not the entirety of the CRM market. You heard Peter speak to the fact that overall business is very healthy. We've got enterprise customers, SMB customers. We still expect to win the vast majority of customers to retain that. We will have the opportunity to win some of these customers back, and we think that's likely to come through. The third and probably the biggest one is that this is a diverse business. It's not only a CRM business. CRM suite is about 20% of total revenue today. The other 80% is continuing to perform really well. It's growing well. There were always multiple paths to 2030.

When we step back and look at the progress that we're making, we feel very good about the progress and how we're tracking out to the 2030 goals.

Speaker 7

Yeah. The way to think about it is the commercial is the part of the business, right, of our total addressable market. Clinical is even a bit bigger than that. Then there is quality and safety and manufacturing and other things. Inside of the commercial, the CRM suite is a part of that, but it is certainly not the majority of it. It is the minority of the commercial area. We have to see how things play out. It is not unforeseen that Crossix can be as big as the whole CRM suite by 2030 as well, right? It is a good business, the CRM, and it is a strong business for us. The CRM suite itself and the number of field reps and things, that is not a growing business. That is kind of a stable business. That is where Veeva started, but it is not our determinant at all for 2030.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Jeff Garro with Stephens. Your line is open.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I want to ask about the comments and the prepared remarks on the quality cloud opportunity expanding. Is that expansion by reaching new customer types or more of a reference to product expansion? Just any further remarks on specific drivers of your success in quality and with labs and CDMOs would be helpful. Thanks.

Speaker 7

Yeah. I'll take that one. This is Peter. Yeah. Quality is one of these areas where we can reach a lot of customers, a lot of different customers, CDMOs, other highly regulated services, industries that are close to life sciences. Our success has been we have three main core products all on a common platform. We have the quality documentation, which is used mainly in manufacturing for managing your standard operating procedures and your changes around that, your quality management system for deviations and CAPAs, etc., and your GxP training, your validated training environment. We are the only vendor that has all of those three all on a common platform. That is what is really driving a lot of the growth. In addition, we have some new products there, batch release and computer systems validation. We are very excited about LIMS.

We announced that early customer in LIMS, the laboratory information management. That's used to test the medicine as it's being manufactured. That's a growth area because there's new manufacturing plants being built because of a variety of reasons, let alone political reasons, etc. New manufacturing plants being built and the medicine and the manufacturing of these medicines is becoming more expensive and more complicated. There's two main solutions used out in that area, and they're both on-premise hosted solutions that are not modern, critically important, but not modern. We have a real greenfield opportunity there. If you look at life sciences, generally, they will research and find a molecule. They will run clinical trials. They will commercialize the product.

Along the way, before they put that medicine even in the first human, they have to manufacture it first in a small volume and then in a large volume. That manufacturing area is critically important. You are manufacturing something that is going to be either ingested by a human or put right into their bloodstream. It is super important how you do that. It is a great growing area for us, quality in the manufacturing space.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Jalindra Singh with Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Speaker 9

Thank you. Thank you for taking my questions. I want to follow up on the macro environment question earlier. You did note in the prepared remarks that the guidance raise is driven by improved visibility into Q4. Can you elaborate on that? Is it stronger renewal activity, upsell momentum, or new logo wins? Related to that, we have seen some good clarity for pharma industry in recent months with all the discussion with the administration. Do you get a sense, based on your conversation, that we could see a potential uptick in client buying trends in the coming year or so?

Speaker 2

Hey, Jalindra. This is Brian. I'll take this one. Yeah, I think really good execution coming out of Q3. We had some earlier timing of deal closure than we expected that contributed to some of the outperformance in the quarter and the raise in Q4 and therefore for the full year. Overall, I think broad strength across the business. On the commercial side, we saw Crossix continue to perform well, but also the SMB commercial side had stronger performance in the other areas of our commercial business, strong performance in R&D, which tends to be more predictable, but we saw strong performance in R&D, and then strong performance as well in our services business and really across professional services and business consulting. We are very pleased with the momentum coming out of Q3 and what we see coming into the quarter.

I think beyond that, we'll factor that into our guidance for next year, which we'll release following the fourth quarter here, but feeling good about the execution of the business as we enter the final quarter of the year.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Steven Valiquette with Mizuho Securities. Your line is open.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. Yeah, I guess for me, my primary question was also going to be on your comments about the unique customer-specific factors driving a few less of the Vault CRM wins. Obviously, you talked about that already. Really, my quick follow-up question is, since it sounds like it really is truly scattered across these customer-specific factors, are there any learnings for Veeva from all of this, either on Vault CRM product design or on pricing, or does Veeva not really change anything going forward on the go-to-market strategy just in the back of all this? Thanks.

Speaker 7

Oh, that's a good question on the learnings. Yeah, we did look through that. Yeah, I think, A, we did things the way we wanted to do things with customer success in mind, and we've gotten our top 20s live. I guess we thought more customers would, 90% of customers maybe, would put weight on that, and some customers didn't. They just wanted to try something new. No particular learning. I would say there's a lot of enthusiasm around the Veeva team, the product, and the services team because it's kind of distracting to try to resell all those top 20 customers all at once, right, in a very short period of time, and you're competing with a product that doesn't really exist yet and a lot of promises and things like that. That is kind of distracting a little bit. We are largely through that.

We used to have 18 out of the top 20. Now we're maybe going to have 14 or so. Now it's back to business as usual and really focusing on those customer success, but with a difference. Now we are entering the age of AI, probabilistic computing to really drive and change what a CRM system can do. That's giving people a lot of excitement. The Vault CRM of 2026 and 2027 and 2028, that's not going to be like the Veeva CRM of 2022 and 2023. That's where the real excitement is.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Speaker 8

Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you. For Paul and Peter, I wanted to get your thoughts on the risk that the CRM market becomes more competitive over time. For example, could the large competitor that has six out of the top 20, could they use that as a beachhead to expand their presence with time with a roadmap that will improve over time? For example, the 14 that have committed to Veeva, could they be thinking about the structure of the ecosystem changing? For example, a year from now or three years from now, could they consider competition? Maybe just give us a little bit of a sense of your conviction on the long term and how Veeva can continue to have the dominant position that it has in the event that the competitive environment does change more structurally on the commercial side. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah. As we think about other areas in commercial, they're generally separate decisions from CRM. The people who make decisions around Vault CRM are generally different than commercial content and Crossix and Data Cloud. Now, we've actually done something unique, and we've connected all of those pieces together. One of the reasons we moved to Vault CRM is to make it feel more like Development Cloud. When you buy into Veeva, you have these really mission-critical areas, Crossix. You're seeing how important that is, commercial content that we have all plumbed up together. We create a lot of value. I think the customers that do decide to buy into Vault and Veeva will get additional value, the synergy of having everything on a common platform where they know everything is just going to work together. We've made a long-term commitment to life sciences.

I think what we're seeing, Salesforce is kind of just entering. They have a very new product in the CRM space. They don't have everything that we've talked about, all of the other software products, commercial content, the Crossix business, all of the data assets, what Peter has talked about earlier with business consulting. We are building just something that's fundamentally very different than what Salesforce is trying to do. I think that's a very significant competitive advantage for us. I think that's why we feel really confident about our long-term market position because, one, we're going to have a better CRM and a CRM suite area, but it's all going to be connected together in building the industry cloud, bringing all of those pieces together. I feel good about the competitive position. I'm happy with where it's shaking out.

Obviously, we love to win every customer, but we're executing well, really, across all of commercial.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Tucker Remmers with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Speaker 2

Thanks for taking my question. My question revolves around the development of AI agents in the clinical suite. I just want to get a sense of how soon you think you can develop some clinical AI agents, what examples you can give, and how can Veeva monetize that in the future? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah. We've published our roadmap around our agents. We're going to have agents in literally all of our software applications as we get through 2026. We started this year. We'll have them in commercial and CRM and commercial content. Next year, in roughly the first quarter, April, it'll be in safety and quality. Through the end of the year, we'll have agents in clinical operations. By the end of the year, clinical data management. We think it's one of those potentially transformative areas in clinicals. It's our largest single opportunity, the clinical business. There's a lot of potential to just streamline a lot of core processes, ETMF, when you just intake a document and scanning through that and making sense of that with an agent, as an example, just replacing core human labor with agents. A lot of potential for productivity.

That's just one example, but I think we see that pretty consistently across the broader clinical area. Super excited about AI because we've actually accelerated our agent roadmap. We'll have it in, like I said, virtually every application area as we get through 2026.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from a line of David Larsen with BTIG. Your line is open.

Speaker 5

Hi. Just going back to these top 20 biopharma clients, can you maybe—I just have a tough time believing with your R&D capabilities, if you have 20 of the top 20 on your Electronic Trial Master File platform, that's where all of the R&D flows out of. Did these four already sign with Salesforce, or did they just sort of verbally tell you they're going to go with Salesforce? How sort of final are those decisions? We keep saying you may win them back. How would that work? Is there a trial period they have with Salesforce? Thanks very much.

Speaker 2

I'll take that one. In terms of the—this is around the CRM product, right, of what we announced, the Salesforce ones, particularly around our CRM product. Again, if I just reiterate, that's about 20% of our business today. Two years ago, it was about 25% of it. We're not going to give a direction of what percentage of our business it would be in 2030, but that's going to be significantly less than 20%. It's a minor part of our business. It has nothing to do with our clinical business, right? Nothing to do with our clinical business. In terms of the win-back, how does that work? When you roll out a pharmaceutical CRM system, you'll do it by region, by region, and you might have a failure in one of those implementations.

You might say, "Well, okay, I'm not going to use Salesforce in that other region. I'll go with Veeva." Or you might have a failure in your first region, and you're going to say, "Well, I'm going to cancel that overall." Or you might have an executive change, and they might have a different idea of what they want to do. Also, you might run with that system, sort of more of a custom-built system for three years, five years, seven years, and then you feel like, "Okay, that's run at the end of the life.

We have a custom system, and the industry has moved on, and we want to move back onto a more industry-standard system. Because with Salesforce, very open platform, so the IT team sometimes can build exactly what they want, and the system integrators kind of feed into that as well, so you end up with a very custom system. These top 20 things have nothing to do with the bulk of our business, especially clinical, and the win-backs happen over time as they naturally would.

Speaker 6

Your next question comes from Sean Dodge with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Speaker 4

Okay. Great. Thanks. Maybe just on the Vault Basics offering you rolled out, it was about, I think, a little over a year back. You had a release a few weeks ago that there are about 100 clients that have selected that. I guess just wondering how we should think about sizing the longer-run opportunity for Veeva in that part of the end market. Obviously, R&D budgets for small biotechs are small, but on the other hand, there are a lot of them. Just maybe kind of thinking about, does that have the potential to be a real needle mover for Veeva at some point here soon?

Speaker 2

It's a very important thing for Veeva because it helps the smaller end of the life sciences industry, and that's critical. For example, it's a very important thing on the clinical side for our larger customers because when they need to evaluate an acquisition, and that acquisition is using Vault Basics in the clinical area, they're going to be much more organized and much easier to automate. Vault Basics helps the industry grow overall, and that's going to help Veeva. In terms of how significant it can be, it's not going to be the significant part of our revenue driver. It's a part of the overall ecosystem. We have 100 customers now. I don't know where that ends up, but it's not impossible that we have 1,000 customers on Basics over time and of the different offerings.

It is a great business, and more than anything, it is the right thing to do, giving a professional solution to these small biotechs so that in the unlikely event that their business really takes off and their molecule really takes off and they are going to be the next Pfizer, okay, they do not have to change systems. They can just graduate from Basics, right in place, and get enterprise Veeva. Super excited about the innovation that is happening in Veeva Basics.

Speaker 6

Thank you. With no further questions queued, I'd like to turn the conference back over to the CEO, Peter Gassner, for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. Thank you to our customers for your continued partnership and to the Veeva team for your outstanding work in the quarter. Thank you.

Speaker 6

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