Veeva Systems Inc. Class A

Good day. My name is Krista and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to VIVA Systems Fiscal 2024 Third Quarter Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Gunnar Hansen, Director, Investor Relations. Gunnar, you may begin your conference.

Good afternoon. Welcome to VIVA's fiscal 2024 third quarter earnings conference call for the quarter ended October 31st, 2023. As a reminder, we posted prepared remarks on VIVA's Investor Relations website just after 1 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 Shawa, EBP Commercial Strategy, and Brent Bowman, 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, December 6, 2023, 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. VBID disclaims 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 gap metrics can be found in 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. Thank you, Gunnar, and welcome everyone to the call.

We had a solid Q3 with revenue and operating income ahead of guidance, including total revenue of $617 million and non-GAAP operating income of $235 million. As I shared in our prepared remarks, we had a number of great milestones and new product announcements in the quarter as we progressed in building our industry cloud for life sciences. With the growing set of high-value applications, data, and services in R&D and commercial, we can help the industry become more efficient and effective across the even broader range of areas. We have a significant opportunity ahead, and with a focus on product excellence and customer success, we're becoming an essential strategic partner to the industry. Now we'll open up the call to your questions.

If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. And we do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Your first question comes from the line of Ken Wong from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Fantastic. My first question is for Peter, maybe Paul. At Investor Day, you guys talked about getting an emotional commitment from customers to move over to Vault CRM. Looks like you've got two written commitments now. Maybe give us some color into what went into that decision-making process for these large enterprises. And what kind of signal do you think this might send to the rest of the industry that are potentially looking at Volt CRM?

Hey, Ken. Thanks for the question. This is Paul. Yeah, so we're super excited about Bayer and GSK. Probably everybody on the call may have seen the press releases. But we also had them join us during the keynote and on the main stage at Europe Summit, which was last week. Super exciting. So they essentially answered your question on the main stage, which was, you know, why did they select Fault CRM? And for them, it came down to something very similar, which was innovation. They were thinking about the future. They're excited about the next generation of CRM. And for them, you know, even I'll paraphrase what GSK said. because he said it very concisely, this idea that pharma CRM is not a commodity, but it's a solved problem thanks to Viva. And what that means is this is something that's very hard. It's difficult. It's something that they've done multiple CRM implementations in the past, and it's not something they want to spend any energy on. They want a solution that works and that's proven, and they want to be able to innovate and look forward. So that, in a nutshell, is the reason. It's innovation. It's looking forward. It's building for the future. So we're super excited to have both Bayer and GSK talk about their selection.

Got it. And then a follow-up for you, Brent. Just as we look at the billing number for the year, you guys trimmed it $40 million. Any way to help us segment how much of that might be the services piece, the FX piece, and I think you kind of mentioned there's a little bit of maybe some combination of duration and timing involved. But we'd just love to kind of understand what the moving pieces are that got you to that 40.

Yeah, happy to, Ken. So about half of it is related to services. So the services reduction we talked about on Investor Day. The balance of it is really split into a couple buckets. One is on the proportion of quarterly billers versus annual billers in our new business. So we had a higher mix of quarterly billers than we expected. And then the other portion of that is related to timing of deals. So some deals we expected to close in the Q4 timeframe. Now it's going to be early fiscal year 25. And then to a smaller extent, there was some FX headwinds as well. So relative to our prior expectations. So those are the pieces of it, but the biggest portion of it was clearly services.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Sure.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. So I'll start with Brent. You know, I think there's been some debate in the past on how the services business correlates to subscription. Is that a leading indicator or not? I've gotten the questions from investors. So I'd love any perspective you have on how we should think about the correlation between subscription and services.

Yeah, services. Yeah. Hey, Brian, services is not a leading indicator. And there's a number of reasons. There's the timing of deals. There's product requirements that are different between the type of product you're buying, customer specific requirements. So that's not going to be a good leading indicator. And then on the subscription side, you have things like ramping deals and pricing and the like. So there's a number of reasons why those two don't directly correlate, and you shouldn't think of it that way.

Great. And maybe just as a follow-up on the marketing automation side, I thought that was an interesting part of the product announcements out of the Investor Day. How do we think about the ramp of that product in any early feedback or thought process and what your customers are using today? Thanks, guys.

I'll take that one. We'll start the development of that next year in 2024. So I think that's one thing you're seeing from Viva as a strategic partner. We have a lot of products across R&D and commercial data, software, and services. So we're a very strategic partner to our customers. So in general, once we know we're going to do something, we let our customers know so that they can do long-range planning around that. So in this case, you saw us announce that before before we've established a development team, for example, for it. So it's very, very early and too early to say what the revenue ramp would be. In terms of what most of our customers are using, they might use Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud. They might use a product from Adobe. Some of the smaller customers will outsource this to agencies. But those are probably the predominant products that are used.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Joe Verbrink from Baird. Please go ahead.

Great. Hi, everyone. You know, in years past, just in this 3Q period, I think Viva has had a fair amount of visibility and inclination just on the upcoming year because of where big pharma customers stand in their budgeting process. I'm wondering if you could maybe compare current visibility on that FY25 revenue target versus what's been the case over recent history and then just related to that topic since, you know, Brian, you were calling out some variables on just billings and this year, you know, how do some of those things you called out maybe start to influence the puts and takes going into 2025? Hey, Joe.

So we reiterated the $2.75 billion and, you know, the visibility that we have, you know, we Every day you move forward, you have better visibility, and we have no less visibility than we had a year ago, so similar as we look out in front of us. And some things to contemplate is we have some multi-year ramping deals that will contribute a larger amount next year. That's something that comes into play, but we have a long runway for growth. Our visibility is not less than it has been historically. It's at least as good, and we're confident in our ability to execute to the number.

That's great. Thanks. And then I wanted to ask the outlook for the commercial segment. It's gone up more than I expected over the course of this year. And in the prepared remarks, I think you are referencing commercial content and link. So kind of a barbell in that you have a very mature product growing nicely and then still very early product growing nicely. You know, there's understandably been a lot of focus on CRM of late, but how would you kind of frame performance from the non-CRM piece of commercial and kind of what you're seeing in market so far to drive what seems like has been upside to your original forecast?

Yeah, Josh, Brent, I'll take that one as well. So we have increased that commercial number through the course of the year. And you put it quite nicely in that it's a combination of our more established products continuing to contribute revenue growth like content. And then our newer products like Link really kicking in nicely. And we're still very early days there. And then the data products, I think you saw in Peter's prepared remarks, really coming along nicely. We're very early days, but we're optimistic in a very long journey there. So those are the things that we think about. And Cross-X is another one that's contributing, you know, nicely as well to our growth.

That's great. Thank you very much.

Your next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Maybe speaking on the theme of data here as well, Brent, you just called out Compass. Maybe for Paul on that side, there's a lot of new customer momentum. I know we're releasing some new offerings there early next year, but how do you think about that enthusiasm, maybe kind of validating the strategy and some of the encouraging momentum from customers around that strategy as we think about that upcoming opportunity? I know it's It's beyond 2024, but as we think about kind of the going or having that kind of full suite as we think about early next year.

Yeah, so it is great validation of what we're doing. We have a very clear product strategy with what we're doing in data. More broadly overall with Data Cloud, we're building a modern data platform. Compass is a key part of that. We started with patient data. We did announce The expansion of that portfolio at the beginning part of next year with prescriber and national. So with those three products in Compass, we're well positioned to be the standard data provider for even the very largest of pharma companies. And the momentum that you saw in the quarter is a good indicator for us. It's a good indicator that new customers are starting and trialing our data products, but that existing customers are expanding. where we started with one brand and then we expand to an additional brand. So it is, in fact, a great validation of our product strategy, our commitment to getting the product excellence. So we're on the right path with Compass. We feel good about that.

Got it. And then maybe for Peter, too, right, as you think about that evolution of data cloud to R&D, obviously a lot of kind of pertinent use cases there. But how do you think about that data standardization playing in with the kind of workflow or process standardization and some of the momentum you're seeing in that clinical suite today and maybe what the value can accrue from having kind of both the connected workflow and standardized data as we think about development life cycles as well. Thanks.

Yeah, I'm really excited about that. I think our clinical opportunity and data can be as large or maybe larger than our commercial one. It really can be large. Now, we're much earlier, so that has to all be proven out. And there's a very strong, very strong synergy between our software and clinical and the data products that we can build. So if you look at a big picture, I think Viva's been working pretty hard at cleaning up the software side of life sciences over the last 15 years and We've made a lot of progress, still more to go with adoption, but we've clearly got a great footprint for it. Now with Data Cloud, I see us cleaning up the industry data and harmonizing the industry data. And then we'll make our data and software work very well together. So that's really what we're talking about for the industry cloud. It's a digital transformation, which is software and data all working together. So I'm very excited about it. I think the special sauce on the clinical side is clinical data all on its own is not as valuable as clinical data that can work with clinical software. And I think we're going to revolutionize that area.

It will just take some time. Great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan McDonald from Niedermann Company. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I mean, first one for Brent, you know, talked about hiring fewer people in the quarter. And as we just look out into next year, you know, what areas might you be adding still and how you're thinking about the hiring environment or hiring plan, you know, given that we're starting now to see, you know, more and more companies right-size their organization structure heading into next year again. Thanks.

Yeah, so overall, our hiring strategy hasn't changed. You know, we're focused on hiring for growth and We're going to focus on areas where we can drive customer success and innovation. So that's always been our approach. And we're going to do it in a disciplined way. You saw on Q3, we had a lower hiring quarter than you have seen in the recent past. And looking out to the balance of fiscal year 24, it's reasonable to expect that lower hiring rate continues. Not going to get into fiscal year 25 at this point in 90 days.

we'll provide our traditional metrics which would include operating income and margin and obviously head count will be factored into that super helpful I appreciate the color uh Peter maybe just to follow up for you um you talked about in the uh in the prepared remarks about some of the newer clinical data products around CDB, RTSM, ePro, and at your analyst day, you're talking about how this really expands the TAM within that area. As you start to speak with customers or prospective customers about some of these newer products, what sort of appetite are you seeing from those customers around development or co-development on some of these newer areas and sort of willingness to make some of those earlier investments with you in innovation on the product roadmap, you know, amidst the evolving environment. Thanks.

Yeah, a great question about the, you know, clinical data software. You have EDC, which is the core of it, the first thing, and then you have others, CDB, you have, we have study training, we have ePro and RTSM. Customers are generally going to be very conservative in that area. So really we have to innovate first and then they will come along because these are their studies, right? And they've planned these studies for a long time, so they're going to be pretty conservative. So I think it's an area that starts slowly, but then for the same reason why it starts slowly, then it develops momentum. And if customers end up having something that they really like, boy, will they stick with it. And right now, the industry is not well served. If you look at the sort of, I would say that professionalism of the ePro applications out there or the RTSM applications out there, they're not of the level of professionalism of Viva, of what Viva is doing. Our products are getting there. So that's one thing, which is both the product and the services. And then I think the real topper is the integration, the process integration, for example, between our RTSM and our eProA. Had a discussion last week with some clinical leaders at a top 20 pharma. And when we were discussing the integration that we will do between our RTSM and our EDC and how that will affect the pre-screening, the screening process, and the ability to get patients into the right trial, you know, this can be transformational. In some cases, when that workflow breaks down, you might lose six months' exclusivity on a blockbuster product because of the delay of a pivotal trial. That's money you never get back. So that's the criticality of these systems, and it causes a little bit of conservatism, right? Well, so I might use your RTSM. Who else is using your RTSM for all of your studies? Well, nobody is yet. You can be first. Oh, well, hey. I'll just, I'll wait and see on that. So it's that type of thing. Hard to get in there, really hard to get out if you're doing a good job.

Appreciate the helpful anecdotes. Thanks. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Jack Wallace from Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Tim, for taking my questions. I just want to ask about Compass and the event around migrating to the Vault CRM platform. How much does Compass come up with a logical upsell here? Is it fair to think about the migration event being a natural upselling opportunity?

It's a great question, Jack, about Compass and Vault CRM. I would say there are not the same at all they're quite just disconnected uh compass in many ways is a much more strategic decision because that that really affects how you apply your resources and encompass where we're reinventing how you can do data so it's a much more strategic decision it's related to analytics and it's purchased at the brand level for brand analytics so it has these dynamics also for example compass is a something we sell to companies that are two years sometimes away from having a field force. They're doing their planning, you know, involved of their market potential. So it's quite disconnected versus where CRM is, hey, now you're ready to launch. You just need a system with the full functionality. Viva, that's kind of a solved problem. So there's what Viva CRM playing into that. On Compass, it's, well, gosh, we've been using IQVIA for 20 years. You're coming with a different approach. Well, hey. So they're really out of phase, and they don't depend on each other. Now, it's nice to have multiple products to be able to bring into a customer so you can provide the full commercial solution, be the CRM, commercial content, cross-ex for your media measurement, link for your deep data, Compass. So we have a lot of things that can fit together. And especially for a smaller company, they will look for that partner, you know, hey, I need to get all this in a hurry. But in general, those things aren't linked together, and I wouldn't view Vault CRM as a catalyst for Compass. Catalyst for Compass is going to be its product excellence and how well we do on our launch of prescriber and nationally anyway.

Yeah, thank you.

That's helpful. And then one for Brent around billings, just to you put a bow around the change in terms and cadence of billings. Help me with the math here. If we had a $12 million headwind in the third quarter, does that mean about $6 million of billings from the third quarter slipped into the first half of next year, and then is that number, say, six to nine from the fourth, so add it all up, $12 to $15 million or so that just due to billing cadence got pushed into $25 million?

Yeah, I'm not going to break down to the specific numbers, but I can give you like the directional numbers around it. So I said about half the services, and then there is the duration piece of it, right? So then the balance is split pretty much between two buckets with a little bit of FX. So that duration piece, that's just a matter of over time when it's going to bill. So we have more quarterly billers than we expected for our new business. So that's about 25% ish of the residual. And then the other piece was literally the timing of deals. Again, some of that was deals that pushed out from the back half of the year into the first part of the year. So that's at the high level, how to break down the buckets. And that's been contemplated in our 2750 revenue number for fiscal year 25.

Got it. Thank you. Sure.

Your next question comes from the line of Stan Berenstein from Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. First, Peter or Paul, in the prepared remarks, it was mentioned you had solid bookings under Cross-Ex, including brand expansions. I recall that Cross-Ex has seen some choppy demand in the prior quarters.

Is the reason that you're seeing a pickup of activity on this front?

I guess the reasons are some is just timing, you know, how things laid out. Also, you know, just solid execution by the CrossFix team on the product and on the sales and marketing. And I think some of our competitors also last year sort of maybe oversold what they could actually deliver. So we had a few potentials where the customers last year went for some things because they were promised quite a few things. actual delivery didn't didn't match and so they they in some cases uh went came back to cross six in some cases they they um went you know went to cross six for the first time so really just solid execution and some timing got it and then maybe one for brent um you know services gross margin in the quarter i think was the highest in eight quarters or so is there anything to call out here besides hiring and

How should we think about the progression going forward?

Thanks. Yeah, from quarter to quarter, you're going to see vacillation in services margins. If you look forward to Q4, Q4 is a lower margin quarter because of holidays and you have less days to be utilized. But we're always going to focus on having the right amount of capacity to address the service demand we have. And we did a nice job of executing to that in Q3, and you saw a little bit higher you know, service margin in the quarter. You know, so the range of margins you've seen over the last four to eight quarters, you know, that's probably a reasonable amount to think about.

We're not looking to maximize it to 50% or anything like that.

Your next question comes from the line of David Winsley from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. Pharma companies, so as backdrop, pharma companies have been trying to move commercial insights deeper into the clinical development stages of their R&D. Viva is unique in its span of solutions across clinical and commercial. I'm wondering how much you think about the integration of those solutions across clinical and commercial to drive stickiness of VIVA's solutions, how important is the transition of vault in that effort, and how important is data in that effort? Thank you.

Peter, I'll take that one. I would say the most important thing that VIVA can deliver in that area is data, data on a common data platform. enabling pharma companies to have a common data architecture across specifically commercial and clinical. So talk about product classes in the same way, disease areas, therapeutic areas in the same way, and so have a common vocabulary and common source of truth in the data on both sides. And to be able to interact with key opinion leaders, the same view of a commercial key opinion leader with a clinical key opinion leader, that's a key thing the most important thing that VIVA can do, and I think we're really the only one setting out to do that. The second one is enabling the process flow between commercial and clinical, so the connection between, for example, our CTMS system and our CRM system. That's useful. And then maybe potentially the biggest barrier is process inside of pharmaceutical companies. Do they have processes? Do they have operating models? Do they have responsibility for enabling that flow? Our business consulting can really help there, especially as we're building up our business consulting and clinical. I think we're going to be experts at helping companies with their business process because you're right, I do feel, and I know most executives of large pharmaceutical companies feel that there's lost value because they're process integration between commercial and clinical is not where they'd like it to be.

Thank you for that.

Sorry, go ahead. I think you can't do that if you're not looking at a common view of the data. You won't be able to accomplish it. That's not sufficient to make that connection happen, but I think it's necessary to make it happen.

That's great. Thank you. As follow-up on a different topic, just in thinking about pipeline funnel discussions in your sales team. I think you've talked over multiple quarters, as have others in life sciences, talked about slower decision-making, budget scrutiny, you mentioned in your prepared remarks, IRA. Could you shed, I mean, not that you haven't talked about it before, but give us the most updated view on how these kind of macroeconomic and IRA-related effects are affecting decision-making, and do you feel like that is getting worse or getting better? Thank you.

Yeah, in terms of interest rates, IRA, global conflicts, over the last 60 days, I don't view it as getting worse or better, per se. It's kind of staying stable. It does result in questioning on decision-making, conservatism. it's kind of a damper on innovation for small biotechs who are, hey, maybe I'm going to start up a biotech company. I need to raise funding. Oh, maybe I can't get funding now, so I don't start that up. I don't create that research. So that's a little bit downer. One of the things that has been happening through COVID and this downturn is some deferral things, right? Viva is a lot of the things we do are core capabilities. You're trying to modernize your core capabilities. During COVID, sometimes I had other priorities. When there's uncertainty, like conflict in interest rates, et cetera, okay, priorities shift a little bit. But I do feel there's more deferred maintenance building up, especially in the sort of top 100 life sciences companies, more deferred modernization of systems that's going to have to be taken care of over the next two, three, four years. So I think there's some some demand starting to get pent up.

That's great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the question, and apologies if you covered this. I've been jumping around a few running stalls tonight. But I wanted to touch on the top 20 pharmas that you did migrate over to Vault CRM. I'm just curious, post that announcement, what's the interest and conversations been with others? And then if you could just share any, you know, milestones or other, you know, goals that you have in terms of the number of farmers that you hope to have, you know, call it over the next few quarters or years.

Yeah. Hey, Tyler. This is Paul. Yeah, so in terms of, you mentioned migrations. These companies have announced their selection. The migration will follow. So they'll do a little bit of services work next year, but you can think of their migration starting in 2025. That's when we'll have early customers next year. You can think about that as a milestone. We'll have some early customers go through the migration process with us. Treat it like an early adopter program like we do with any other product. So that's what we'll use next year for. And then 2025, we'll be ready to scale. So that's what's next for these companies. They've announced their selection. They want to be able to communicate that internally and align their organization on what their go forward strategy is. That's really important for them to get organized and focused and aligned. So they've shifted from decision mode to execution mode. Now, in terms of other companies, We're ready when they are. I think this has created some additional urgency. Our expanded, our new commercial cloud has created some additional excitement and energy that moving to the Vault platform unlocked a lot of that innovation. But there's no timeline. We're not forcing our customers to go on any particular timeline. I do expect most will go starting in 2025, but 2026, 2027, that's when you'll start to see the majority of customers moving.

Yeah, if I just chime in there, you're also a question about momentum. Our customer summit in Europe calls over 1,000 people there, right? And Bayer were there and GSK were there, and they speak both in a large session and in smaller executive sessions. So it's certainly a momentum builder, right? Not only that they're going to Viva, well, CRM's, But why and what was their thought process? Because these companies are kind of leading the charge. So great reference selling there. Also things like we demoed, we did a concept demo of Service Center for the first time live to the customers there. And I think that was very well received. So the vision starts to get clear and it's building the momentum.

got it and and yeah sorry i didn't mean migrations i would have been impressive if you migrated those customers and in weeks i meant more the more the signing so so good uh good to hear the uh the excitement from other customers uh just as a follow-up brent i know you your favorite topping uh topic here on billings but um i guess two quick clarifications um number one is we think about the updated normalized billings guide for this year, you know, and you walk through some of the puts and takes that's driving it down. I guess the changes to billings terms and invoicing duration, wouldn't that be normalized, if you will, in the normalized billings? Or is the normalization just for TFC? And then I know you're not guiding the billings for FY25, but just as we think about the historical relationship between revenue and billings and what does seem to be maybe some

modest duration headwinds anything to keep in mind there thank you sure on your first part of your question so what we normalize is we normalize this for changes in our renewal base so if you have an existing customer renewal base they change frequency or they change duration we normalize that out so we take the noise out what we do for new businesses we do our best effort to model what we expect the profile of that new business to come in And so what you're hearing me say is the expectation we had for new business, there was the actual fact pattern was a bit different. So we had more quarterly billers in that new business than we anticipated. We thought we'd have a bit more annual. So it's new business, not normalized. It's the renewal portion that we do normalize. And then your second question is, you know, we contemplated in the billings, you know, that we are exiting fiscal year 24 in our reiterated fiscal year 25 total revenue number. So 2.75 billion dollars and we feel good about our ability to execute against that.

Your next question comes from the line of Gabriella Borges from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Callie Valente on for Gabriella. Just one for me and going to be again on the billings dynamic, but just related to the deals that you talked about being pushed from the back half of this year into early next year, there's clearly a change versus your initial expectations. And I know you said there's nothing incremental in the past 90 days on macro, but can you help us reconcile those two comments a little bit?

Yeah, I mean, you're going to have, it's going to be customer by customer, right? There is no exact pattern. that you can say across the larger cohorts. And in the first half of the year, I don't know if you recall, we had favorable linearity. So from period to period, it's going to ebb and flow depending on the specific customer situation, what approvals they require, the size and scale and the complexity of the deal. So it's a continuation of what we've seen. Sometimes it's in your favor, sometimes it's not. And that's what we saw.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Kirk Matern from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks very much. Paul, just, you know, there's going to be a lot of discussion about migrations over the next couple years, and how should we think about sort of the services work around all this, meaning you're going to have a lot of customers obviously going through the migration process. How do you make sure that there's not sort of a bottleneck from a services perspective so that And maybe there's just not enough work, so it's not that big of a deal. But I was just kind of curious, how do you make sure that the right customers, especially your big ones, are aligned with either your own services capabilities or your GSI partners? Can you talk about that a little bit? Thanks.

Yeah, sure. And one of the things we're laser-focused on right now is making the migration as repeatable as possible. And that's going to include some product work that we're doing to automate some of the migration. But it also includes scaling out the vault CRM services team. And we have people now dedicated and focused to that. Part of this is focus pays off. And this is the kind of thing that we think about when we think about executing really well. Part of our strategy is to execute really well in this area, and we're putting dedicated people on it. And that's going to help us create the focus, but also the team to expand and scale and support customers as they We know roughly what that timeline looks like, so we'll be ready to support it. And I would say the third part of it is enabling our partner ecosystem. So we are working closely to make sure that they know what our role is and they know what their role is and how they can help us and how we can help scale support customers really across the globe. Remember, this is the U.S., it's Europe, it's Asia, it's LATAM. So we have a lot of customers, and we're making sure that we're ready with our own tooling, our services, and our partners.

Yeah, and you mentioned that, you know, go ahead, please.

I'll just chime in there a little bit. You know, one way to think about it is we had a big, big bolus of work around Beavis here between 2012 and 2017. You know, roughly speaking, maybe we moved, you know, somewhere around half the market, a bit less than that, from Siebel or Segenim or some other things to Beavis here. I mean, that was a, Big bullets of work that was done by Viva Services and our partners like Accenture and regional partners over a five-year period. Now, we have this five-year period from 2025 to 2030. We probably have about as much work to do. Now, we have more movement to do because we have to move, you know, 90% of the industry over. But the effort is less than, you know, significantly less than half of the effort. And certainly in the migration, it's less than half. So we have to mobilize our own services and the partners to do that. But these are things that we know how to do.

That's helpful, Peter. Thanks for dimensionalizing that. And then, Brent, one more just on billings. In terms of the duration changes that you're seeing, are these bigger customers that just want to break it up into bite-sized pieces from a payments perspective, smaller customers just trying to save cash, etc.? ? I was just wondering if there's any commonality that you're seeing that's sort of hitting duration right now. I realize it fluctuates, but has anything changed, I guess, on that front? Thanks.

Yeah, nothing fundamental has changed. I mean, specifically, a couple of the large items were simple co-terms. So you have, you know, they're just co-terming to the number of deals they have onto a common date. So it's nothing more fundamental than that. Great. Thank you all. Sure.

Your next question comes from the line of Jalindra Singh from Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and thanks for taking my questions. Given some of the macro issues you guys have talked about, I was just curious how are price increase conversations trending so far, especially in an environment when macro has got a little challenging. Making sure you guys still feel good about your 4% price increase expectations for next year.

I can take that one. Overall, we're not doing price increases. We keep up with the CPI, and we're doing it in a very customer-friendly way. We're capping that by 4%, and we're doing that in arrears by giving the customers at least eight months' notice, depending on when their order forms is. It's going well, and I definitely don't view it as a price increase. It's very predictable from Viva. The macro is not really affecting that.

Okay. Then my follow-up is around, you know, the comment you had in your prepared remarks about data market and life science moving somewhat slower than the software market. And you called out anti-competitive behavior from one of your peers. Can you elaborate more on that? Is that something you have observed more recently after your push in this market? And how does those market dynamics impact your approach and generally just pushing this market?

Yeah, I call that the behavior of our competitor IQVIA. No, that's not a recent dynamic. I've been aware of that for more than 10 years. And of course, IQVIA has been in court multiple times for this. So it's not a, it's just not a new dynamic. I just felt in the prepared remarks to call it out that in data it can be a bit slower moving because of the conservative in that area is conservatism in that area. That's understandable. And then the anti-competitive behavior of IQVIA also creates significant barriers there. Because let's say the customer is using IQVIA data for one data product, and we're selling one data product. And our services are necessary to mix those two data products together to provide a solution for the customers. Well, IQVIA is not going to allow us to do that. They're not going to grant what's called a third-party agreement. So that's what slows things down. You know, we're making great progress, and it's easier for a small company when they start up. So I think next year you'll see some smaller companies commercializing for the first time that just decide, look, I'm going to be IQVIA-free for my whole life, and I'm going to start out that way. I don't need to deal with that old stuff anymore. I think that's going to happen, but, you know, that's a long way from – hey, most of the top 20 using Viva for most of their data products, for most of their brands, that's a 15-year journey.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Craig Huttenbach from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Just following up on the buyer and GSK commentary, Is there anything in particular about those customer relationships that made it logical for them to be early adopters on bulk CRM? And how are you thinking about the cadence for additional customers from an announcement perspective like next year?

Yeah, good question. And every customer is unique. They're all in their own different stages, whether that's things related to their business or their pipeline. or when they may have product launches. GSK and Bayer, we've had good, long-standing partnerships with both companies for a very long time. And their thinking, they both had this idea of leading thinking. We want to put the decision-making process behind us, and we want to start focus on executing. They were confident. They did their due diligence. They very quickly became very confident in their answer and their approach. So they wanted to put a clear stake in the ground and make that decision and communicate it and now shift into execution mode. So I would say just strong partnership. We've delivered very well and consistently for them for a very, very long time. They trust Viva. So they're ready to move forward. In terms of other customers and the rest of the market, we're certainly in conversations with The rest of the top 20, all of the large enterprise companies, of course, are small and medium-sized customers. Many of those conversations have started. It's not a mathematical thing. You won't see – we know we have the next roughly five or six years, but it's not mathematical. It's dependent upon many different factors and variables. So I would think of it as we're in that early customer stage right now, and then over time you'll start to see it rampant. And, you know, some of these you may not see announcements. I think the way to think about it is we'll provide updates when there's kind of a material update to give. You may not see an announcement for every customer, but when there's something material, we'll kind of let the street know.

That's helpful. Thanks, Paul. And then, Peter, you made a comment regarding the IRA in terms of smaller biotech innovation. That's certainly... focus here. I'm curious just your larger pharma companies, any feedback you're hearing from them, whether it's maybe trade-offs they're making as they kind of manage around this. Any feedback there?

Yeah, they're looking at that in terms of their product planning. Where would they invest? Should they invest in that molecule? Should they delay running a trial or accelerate running a trial? So certainly it affects their they're planning um but you know pharma is good at that they have to adjust to these factors these government factors around the globe and so i think they're they're adjusting and it may become the new new normal in a you know in a year or two so no no dramatic change when just causing some adjustments okay thank you your next question calls

It comes from the line of Charles Rye from TD Cowan. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Lucas on for Charles. I want to ask about the development cloud and the subscription growth framework you guys have going forward. If I look back at the Invest Today slides where you guys break out customers and products per customer, it shows that you guys are seeing fewer total products sold in the development cloud through fiscal first half. At the same time, you're guiding to 22% to 23% growth in 4Q after accounting for the impact of TFC, which is a step down from 3Q and 2Q. You guys have noted that you're not seeing any impact from macro and subs quite yet, but this is a notable step down in growth. Is this an indication that this segment is starting to mature a bit and that we should think about this category growing at a more mature rate going forward? And then understand that we'll get guidance at the next print, but is this 22% growth rate XTFC a good jumping off point for R&D subs growth in fiscal 25?

Yeah. So, to your point, we reiterated the fiscal year 25 guide at $2.75 billion. So, clearly that factors in subscription and services and the mix underneath that. Now, what we did see was timing, you know, when you talk about in the year. So, There's some timing that impacted fiscal year 24 that will have less of an impact on fiscal year 25. But importantly, we have a long runway for growth in front of us. You know, we're very early days and across the portfolio, specifically in R&D. And to your point, we'll get into the details in about 90 days.

Okay. Thanks. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Brent Braceland from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Hi guys, this is Hannah Rudolph on for Brent. Thanks for taking my questions. Encouraged to hear about your early traction with Vault CRM. For those six non-Vault Viva CRM customers you landed in the quarter, do most of them plan to migrate to Vault CRM before that 2030 deadline? Or is that even part of the discussion when you're signing with them?

Yeah, so we did have, we had a good strong quarter with CRM overall. So we had nine wins and you're right. Some of them are on Viva CRM, and each of those is a discussion with the customer, what's right for them and based on their timing. And yes, of course, that's the strategy is to start on Viva CRM, and then at some point before 2030, they'll move over to Vault CRM. And certainly for some of these customers that are now doing Viva CRM, that transition path becomes pretty clear and very, very clean. So they have full awareness and knowledge, and that's part of the strategy.

Great. Super helpful. And then at your European commercial summit, other than Vault CRM, what commercial developments were customers most excited to hear about?

Yeah. Gosh, you're asking me to pick one. We had a very lively Europe summit yesterday. So part of that is related to we now have our commercial products, our software products that are moving and all part of the ball platform. So that unlocks a lot of potential for us. So we were able to announce quite a bit. One is that Peter alluded to the service center demo. Remember we announced that five or six months ago at our US summit and now we demoed it live. So really strong execution that resonated really well. The announcements around marketing and patient CRM were certainly appreciated. And then in the data space, we had a new data announcement around pulse data, and Peter talked a lot about that during our investor day. But more broadly, what we're doing in data, the innovation we're bringing in data by creating this common data architecture. So you asked for one thing, I gave you four or five, but it was really kind of an action-packed summit with lots of announcements, and we created a lot of momentum in multiple different areas.

Paul, there's a lot of excitement around modular content and the commercial content areas as well. That track was very lively because we've done things over the last year in modular product content, and now it's getting adopted in the field, so there's great excitement over that one too.

For sure, and And just to go into that a little bit deeper, we're executing really well on the commercial content side and modular content. But as we think about what Vault allows us to do, it's bringing that content closer to the engagement channel. It's a platform that uniquely supports both of those content and the engagement, whether it's the sales channel or field medical or even marketing in the future. So it's highly unique in that we're in a unique position to be able to solve that content distribution from the time you create it in a very modular, efficient way all the way to the time it gets out to the end customer, whether it's a marketing channel or a sales channel. So, yeah, that was also another exciting announcement.

Super helpful commentary. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Brad Sills from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Oh, great. Thank you so much. I wanted to ask about the comments on, you know, some of the deal slipping that affected the quarterly billings into next year. Any more color there? I mean, we typically hear about deal slipping, and then they close in the subsequent quarter or so. What are the puts and takes that are impacting that, and what gives you that confidence that these will close next year? Thank you.

I'll take that one. Each deal is different, but I would say, by and large, just timing that gets pushed out by some random bounces of the ball and some conservatism and extra scrutiny. So that's what it is. What gives us confidence is the competitive environment is stronger than ever, right? So that's what gives us real confidence, both in each of our product areas and then customers seeing that, wow, we can bring complete solutions across R&D and commercial software and data. Also, the customers being slightly a bit more conservative, they're not, customers are spending less on speculative projects. So they tend to go more towards Viva and core capabilities. So that's what gives me even more confidence about our strong market position. And then since our products aren't optional over time, I have a lot of confidence that our market share, we're in a better market position than we were 12 months ago.

Wonderful. Thank you. And then if you could comment, please, Peter, on just the clinical deal pipeline and how How that's been impacted, you know, it would seem less impacted by the macro because it's trial related. But these are also big transformational projects if it's a new customer, for example. So any commentary or observations on how the macro has impacted that clinical business, which is such a critical growth driver? Thank you.

Yeah, we have a small amount of our businesses in the clinical and the very small customers, you know, maybe that have under 500 employees, under 300 employees. So that's certainly impacted because sometimes people can't get the funding to do the trial or, you know, they may go out of business. So that's impacted specifically. Other than that, the general conservatism doesn't impact clinical any more than it would be regulatory or safety or quality. These are large infrastructure projects, you know, and they're just having a bit more scrutiny than they used to.

Understood. Thank you, Peter. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Richard Poland from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hey, this is actually Richard Deloria from RBC. Not sure why I put my colleague's name, but thanks so much for taking my question. I actually wanted to ask two questions around generative AI. First, I would love to maybe drill a little bit into kind of a theme that we've been hearing more as we've been doing our conversations with partners and industry people. which is that as generative AI is working behind clinical trials, it is leading to maybe more of a tailwind towards personalized and precision medicine, which feels like not only should that benefit your CDMS platform, but even on the data side, what you have with Compass, correct me if I'm wrong, seems like it's maybe a little bit more tailored to that. So maybe you could help us understand some of the trends that you're seeing out there and how that can play out, and then I've got a quick follow-up.

Yeah, in terms of generative AI, you know, honestly, I haven't seen a big impact in clinical. There's good experimentation and projects around helping to write or evaluate protocols, for example, but not, you know, using things like generative AI to do statistical analysis or predict where the patients are. I think they're the more appropriate tool which people are using and continue to use more and more of is data science, really having the right data, running the right algorithms, being systematic about it. So, yeah, I just haven't seen that impact of generative AI. You see it more in other areas that relate to content creation and asking of questions, writing safety narratives, things like that.

Got it. No, that's really helpful. And then maybe just sticking on the theme of clinical and Gen AI, coming off the EU commercial summit, I'm sure you heard a lot of use cases from customers that they want to explore around Gen AI and the commercial side. I think a lot of those are very straightforward. Maybe on the clinical side, right? I mean, you talked a little bit about CDMS. But I imagine there's a lot of data you have, Peter, as you put to your point around content, including regulatory submissions to the FDA. You know, I imagine there's probably use cases around the type of language that people can use to expedite their approvals and so on and so forth. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what sort of use cases you're hearing from customers that they want you to be part of when it comes to the clinical side of the equation. That would be really helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. So some are just very straightforward, what's called clinical master data. Who are the investigators? Who are in the sites around the world? And what is their patient characteristics like? That's hugely important for site selection, but also for recording your internal operations. How efficient are you? So that's what we call open data clinical. uh site base is the deep profiles around all the sites and investigators all their specialties um all their all their activity so that's again for for more detailed site selection then clinical pulse that's something we've announced which we'll be producing next year and that's things like okay i'm a pharmaceutical company and i've picked these two milestones to measure What's the time between my last patient visit and my lock of my clinical database? And I'm a pharmaceutical company. What's my time there? Okay, and now what's the industry's average time there? So that I can start to see, am I ahead behind there? What's my opportunity for improvement or not? And that's just one measurement. So I think it's those three areas that customers are excited about from Viva, the clinical master data, The deep data, specifically around site selection, critically important. And then the clinical pulse to optimize their internal business processes and benchmark against the industry.

Wonderful. Thank you so much.

We have no further questions in our queue at this time. I will now turn the call over to Peter Gassner, Chief Executive Officer, for closing remarks.

I'd like to close by thanking our customers for their trust and partnership, and our employees for their continued commitment to our values of do the right thing, customer success, employee success, and speed. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.