5/30/2024

speaker
Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric and I will be a conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the VIVA Systems Fiscal 2025 First 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 this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, Press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Gunnar Hansen, Senior Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

speaker
Gunnar Hansen

Good afternoon and welcome to VIVA's fiscal 2025 first quarter earnings conference call for the quarter ended April 30th, 2024. 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 Yasner, our Chief Executive Officer, Paul Shalwa, EVP Commercial Strategy, and Tim Cabral, our Interim 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 risk listed in our earnings release and risk factors included in our most recent filing on Form 10-K. Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today, May 30, 2024, 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. DBA disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement. 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 understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation to comparable GAAP 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.

speaker
Peter

Thank you Gunnar and welcome everyone to the call. It was a strong start to the year with results above our guidance. Total revenue in the quarter was $650 million with non-GAAP operating income of $261 million. As I shared in our prepared remarks, we've reduced our full year revenue guidance by about $30 million from $2.74 billion to $2.71 billion. as the macro environment remains challenging. Despite macro headwinds, we continue to execute well and deliver customer success. In R&D, we saw continued adoption in all areas of development cloud, including three top 20 BioPharma wins that span multiple products. And in commercial, we're making great progress on our commercial cloud vision. With Vault TRM and in data cloud, early momentum for Compass is strong. We have a clear and compelling product strategy and are building a very durable company with a long runway of growth. We'll now open up the call to your questions.

speaker
Operator

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Joe Ruink with Baird. Please go ahead.

speaker
Joe Ruink

Great. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just to start, of the change you're making to the R&D subscription outlook, about $17 million, how much of that is deal timing versus some of the other factors mentioned in the stakeholder letter? And then when it comes to deal timing, curious, what are the indications from customers you're hearing that these are programs so set to come through at year-end and So ultimately, they're not lost, but they're more contributors than FY26 and 25, perhaps.

speaker
Tim

Yeah. Hey, Joe. Tim here. Thanks for the question. As it relates to the reduction in subscription on the R&D side, a little over 50% is related to the deal timing and the enterprise business. and the remainder is related to the SMB that we discussed. Overall, if you include services there, Joe, it's more of a 60% to enterprise, roughly 60% to the enterprise business. And Peter, do you want to take on the other question that Joe asked?

speaker
Peter

Sure. In terms of these deals, these are normally core systems that we're selling. So, These are systems that are going to need to be upgraded, modernized, enhanced over time. So our competitive position is really good. We're not losing these deals. It's just getting deferred. Now, in terms of the exact timing, you know, that's our forecast, and that's based on a lot of individual customer discussions. So, you know, that's accurate to the best of our knowledge at this time.

speaker
Joe Ruink

Okay, that's great. And then I wanted to ask about the commercial summit from a few weeks ago. There were quite a few good updates there, both new products from Viva. Also sounds like good engagement with partners just in terms of how you plan to approach the CRM migration framework with both tools and processes. What would you say are kind of the big takeaways to focus on from the summit and then any feedback from customers or partners afterwards that you found notable?

speaker
Paul

Yeah. Hey Joe, this is Paul. Uh, thanks for the question. Uh, yeah. So summit was, it was a really great event, a great success. And I would say pretty, you know, as we, we brought together over 2000 people from across the industry and a wide variety of areas, sales, uh, marketing operations, it, we had over, we had about a hundred customers presenting across all those areas and from 50 different companies. So pretty broad-based, covering everything from Cross-X, Compass, and what we're doing in CRM commercial content. So great event, a lot of momentum. I would say a couple big takeaways. One is in the data cloud area, specifically in Compass, we had a lot of customers talking about what they're doing with patient data, how the how it's changing and how they operate and changing their business in terms of finding more customers, finding more patients, the quality of the data. So Compass had some really specific and good testimonials from customers and partners about the value that it's adding. So Compass was certainly a highlight of the event. The other one I would say is in the CRM area. We talked about our vision for unifying sales, marketing, and medical. We're doing something foundationally different there. We're bringing all of those together in a single vault that hasn't been done before. That was the core of our strategy, but we announced a whole number of innovations in the CRM area. That got our customers really enthused and really excited. Everything from our AI strategy to CRM now being on vault, rethinking the content supply chain. So a number of different innovations in different areas, which created a lot of excitement. I'd also say our new products, the momentum that we have there, Service Center and Campaign Manager, we demoed them. So just within a year or so after announcing them, we're now showing demos, and both of them are going to be available this year. And I guess maybe to wrap it up in the CRM space, we had our third top 20 on stage talking about their commitment to Vault CRM, why they moved, which was about getting to innovation faster, getting on that innovation train. So really successful event, a lot of momentum, a lot of announcements in a number of different areas. But the feedback was overall extremely positive from our customers. Lots of good signals about our clear product strategy and commercial. So happy with how things went.

speaker
Joe Ruink

That's great to hear. Thank you very much.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria with RBC. Please go ahead.

speaker
Rishi Jaluria

Oh, wonderful. Thanks so much for taking my question. Peter, I want to start with you and your prepared remarks. You had mentioned one of the impacts on FY25 guidance is some disruption in large enterprises as they work through their plans with AIs. Can you be a little bit more specific? How is that manifesting itself? Is that on commercial? Is that on clinical? Is that on both? And what exactly does that mean? And maybe alongside that, as we think about your overall AI strategy, at least what we picked up in a lot of our conversations is companies are increasingly wanting to work with their trusted vendors on their AI strategy. Given that you are such an important partner to the life sciences industry, how do you plan on using that position to help companies with their AI strategy. And then I've got a quick follow-up for Jim.

speaker
Peter

Richie, let's see. So the first part of it is the disruption, what we mean by that. So you look at a year or so, a little more than a year ago, AI really burst upon the scene, Gen AI. And that causes, it became very accessible. You know, you saw it on 60 Minutes. You could log on and try it yourself. I could answer a question. So that caused a lot of pressure in our larger enterprises and the IT department. Hey, what are we going to do about in AI? What's our strategy as a large pharmaceutical company biotech about AI and that would land in the IT department of these companies. Now for the smaller, our smaller SMB customers doesn't land so much. They have other things to think about, had other more pertinent, very stressful things, but in the large companies, With tens of thousands of people, they're looking for these operational efficiencies that they could potentially get through AI, and they have a budget to kind of get ahead of that game. So that, by the word disruption, I meant that threw a competing priority into our customers. Hey, we had some existing plans. Now this AI, we have to plan for what we're going to do on that. Where are we going to spend on it? you know, innovation, on experimentation, who's going to do that, what budget would we use, that type of thing. So, some of that would take an impact onto us, which is core systems. Now, those core systems, when we get that type of impact, it will delay a project, but it won't stop it, because these core systems are things you need. You can delay them, but all that does is create somewhat of a pent-up demand. I guess, Rishi, there was a good parallel list with COVID, the pandemic a few years ago. That created a whole different set of dynamics with vaccines and therapies and work from home, priorities, all types of things that created a disruption, which then, okay, take the focus off of the core systems a bit, and then it came back again. So that's the first part. That's the answer there. In terms of the AI strategy, our strategy is to really enable customers and their partners to develop AI applications because they're going to be very specific AI applications, gen AI applications for very specific use cases, whether it's field information, pre-call planning, next-desk action, what have you. They're going to be very specific applications. That innovation has to come from everywhere, and One of the things it needs is clean data. All these AI applications need clean, concurrent, fast data. So one of the things we did started about two years ago, actually, is put in a new API on the Vault platform called the Direct Data API. And that was just released this April. And that provides concurrent, consistent data about 100 times faster than normal APIs. So I think that's going to be a a great thing. Now, when we look to the long term, some of those applications will be developed by our customers, some by partners, and over time, probably some by Viva as well. But we're concentrating on the foundation, the APIs for the data, the core system, because that's really only Viva that can deliver that for our customers. So that's what we're focused on.

speaker
Rishi Jaluria

Okay, great. That's really helpful. And then, Tim, I understand. Maybe one more?

speaker
Peter

You talked about trust. I wrote that down. That's a key part of Viva, too. We have that trust. We have to continue to earn that trust. So we don't really get into things that are too speculative. We definitely don't overpromise. The trust is the most valuable thing we have. So we'll be really targeted when we get into an AI application. If we do, it'll be an area where, hey, that's a use case that we're pretty sure that can be solved by Gen AI. and there's not a great partner to do it, okay, then we might step in because we do have that trusted position.

speaker
Rishi Jaluria

All right. Thanks, Peter. That's really helpful, caller. And then, Tim, just as I think about the lower guidance, you know, I appreciate there's moving pieces. I understand macro is really rough out there. We've seen that throughout the software earnings season. I guess, of course, I want to kind of delve into is it's not a big cut. It's mostly services, a little bit of FX, a little bit of incremental macro. But we've had a lot of guide downs over the past several quarters. What would give us confidence that this is the last cut and we're not going to see further cuts from here? In other words, is the outlook conservative enough and with enough conservative assumptions in it that we won't see another guide down? Thank you.

speaker
Tim

Yeah. Hey, thanks, Rishi, for the question. You know, I think our guidance philosophy, so stepping back for a second, our guidance philosophy has not changed. necessarily you know we were very thoughtful about it we look to the information that we have to inform us in our guidance and and i think that's that's been consistent um as we look at the data and as peter talked about earlier in terms of our sales forecast um again we're very thoughtful in terms of Those insights that we have, specifically to our customer base, because we work so closely with them on a number of things. Look, we can't promise you if other macro things continue to deteriorate materially and that has a material impact or an impact to life sciences, that we won't have to do something here. But again, this is the best information we have that informs the guidance that we've given today, Rashida.

speaker
Rishi Jaluria

All right, very helpful. Thank you so much, both of you.

speaker
Operator

Next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Please go ahead.

speaker
Dylan Becker

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions here. Maybe, Peter, for you, I wanted to pair some of the comments you're talking about, kind of disruptions and delayed decisioning from some of the larger enterprise customers versus what looks like some healthy top 20 companies clinical R&D momentum and adoption in the quarter. Maybe what are some of the kind of divergence areas you're seeing between those that are feeling the impacts of those disruptions versus some of those that are maybe able to leverage the opportunity and move a bit faster?

speaker
Peter

Yeah, I would say what you're referring to there is in the top 20 in R&D. And You know, it's really customer-specific situations because there's only 20 top 20. It's not such a large number that you can make general patterns. I would say some companies are spending more on the AI experimentation and learning and proof of concepts, and some are spending less. So that's one thing. And then I think with many of these customers, it's just timing, you know, Some have needs in this area or that area. So there's no particular pattern there.

speaker
Dylan Becker

Okay, that's helpful. And then maybe Paul, switching over to you, you called out this kind of cross-functional collaboration between marketing, sales, and medical. I understand that it's likely a multi-year journey here, but how much of an emphasis is that first step in getting the data in order showing up in the commercial strength you guys are seeing here? And maybe what that can mean as a potential value unlock for further innovation and value creation opportunities over time for the commercial side. Thanks.

speaker
Paul

Yeah, this is really a long term is a journey and it's a long term vision. I think what we're what we are doing, we're taking the opportunity because we now have the ball platform. We're able to build these different functional areas that. Historically, a lot of them have been separate. They've operated in separate systems. They've operated in silos, sales and marketing as one example. And we're building them into the same vault so they can all operate on literally the same exact customer record at the same time. So things become more real time, more collaborative. Sales can be involved in a marketing campaign as one example. Marketing can see exactly what sales is doing. So it's a It's a new way of operating, and we are enabling that through some of the new products that we've announced, like Service Center, which is for inside sales reps and the call center and hybrid reps, of course, but then also campaign manager, which is for the marketing team. And we're doing it in a very different way by building them all. They all live together. That's the way to think about it. So this will be a multi-year journey. It'll be something that will likely start with small and mid-sized customers who are able to take advantage of this. They'll likely move to Vault sooner, and we have new customers on Vault CRM. They'll be able to take advantage of that sooner, and then over time, it will be for larger customers. So this is a multi-year journey, but it's a foundational thing. When you get onto Vault CRM, you have access to all of this innovation and this ability to kind of change how you operate. So we're excited about the long-term potential here.

speaker
spk13

Great. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer and Company.

speaker
Ken Wong

Great. Thanks for the question. This one may be Peter or Paul. I was surprised to see multiple new Vault CRM customers were already live. what was the feedback from customers in terms of that implementation go-live timeline, and then how might these early wins and go-lives impact future engagements with your existing CRM customers?

speaker
Paul

Yeah, so first we have, we make really great progress in the product to be able to sell Vault CRM to additional customers, and then as of April 1st, it's the It's the sole go-forward solution. So every new customer after April 1 will be on Vault CRM. So it's a testament to how far the product has come in such a short period of time. So we're executing well from a product standpoint. But it's also a testament to the execution of the broader team, the services team, and getting the product up and running. And the feedback from customers is that it works well. It's meeting their needs. Now, these are smaller companies. Some of them, many of them are pre-commercial companies. So their requirements are a little bit more in that early market, somewhat simpler kinds of requirements, but they're doing well and they're using the system. And it's creating a good foundation for us to expand. You have to start somewhere. We started and we're expanding now to more and more customers. And that's the foundation for what we expect the vast majority of the industry to migrate to over a period of time. So it's a really good milestone, and we're happy with the adoption and the customer success so far with Wolf CRM.

speaker
Ken Wong

Okay, perfect. And then quickly, Tim, on the billing side – the $35 million cut to billings and lots of moving pieces there, is it fair to characterize the subscription portion of that being fairly consistent with the revenue cut, the $5 million subscription revenue cut?

speaker
Tim

Hey, Ken. Yeah, it's in the ballpark. The two major pieces that impacted our billings guide down was the $25 million reduction in our services revenue, Ken, and then we called out you know, roughly a $10 million headwind from an FX perspective as the yen and the euro have gotten a little weaker in the last 90 days.

speaker
Ken Wong

Okay, perfect. Thanks, Tim.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
Stan Berenstein

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe first for Peter or Paul, you called out in the prepared remarks CrossX had a great quarter. Can you just maybe talk through the traction there and market demand, customer trends? And also, if you can touch on the fact that historically, I think you've mentioned a goal to pivot this segment to a more recurring revenue model. Just any updates on that would be great as well. Thanks.

speaker
Paul

Yeah, sure, Stan. So CrossX, I would think about it as two parts of the business. There's the marketing and optimization side. And there's the CrossX audiences and we perform well in both of those businesses and marketing and optimization. That's the one that we specifically referred to as trying to move that to more of a stable enterprise license agreement type stream. And we're early days in that. We have had our first customer move to that. It's working well for them. It allows them to be able to use CrossX really across all their brands foundationally to kind of measure and optimize their marketing. Uh, so that works well. Uh, we will continue to focus on that over time, but it's, we're not going to do anything unnatural. It's a, it's a, something that we want to do in a customer friendly way and make sure that it creates value for our customers. Um, we have the best product there and the market has become more healthy. So we're, we're executing well on that side. And then across its audiences, we invested a whole lot more in that over the past couple of years, and that's paying off. We have a really great product. And for those of you that don't know what it is, it's to get more precise in your media. So your media reaches the right patient population. We combine consumer and health data to get precise in how you reach targeted audiences. And we have the best product there. And the market has also become more healthy. So proud of the execution and the innovation that we've done on both sides of the CrossX business.

speaker
Stan Berenstein

Got it. I appreciate the caller. And then maybe a quick follow-up for Tim. So your guidance is a bit more constructive on commercial cloud subscriptions. Obviously, lots of developments during the quarter, but anything specific to call out in terms of the driver of upside to full your expectations? Thanks.

speaker
Tim

Yes, Stan. I would say it's consistent or somewhat related to the question you just asked, Paul. We are seeing broad-based upside with specific upside in our Cross6 business that drove the upside in the most recent guidance we gave.

speaker
Paul

Got it. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Stephanie Davis with Barclays. Please go ahead.

speaker
Stephanie Davis

Hey, guys. Thank you so much for taking my question. I was hoping to talk a little bit about the evolution of Compass just given you did call it a bunch of healthy new wins this quarter. So, when I think about the two big areas of differentiation that you first called out, you talked about data speed and data restrictions. How did that play into the wins this quarter? And what kind of applications have you thought about building given these differentiations on the data?

speaker
Peter

Hey, Stephanie. This is Peter. I'll take that. Compass Compass is very innovative. I would say Compass is as innovative as Vault was when we introduced it in 2011. It was a new way of doing things, and people had to adjust to it. And not everybody got it at first because it was so new and so different. So we were with early adopters. The same thing with Compass. It's fundamentally innovative. fundamentally different than what IQVIA has done in the past. IQVIA and the others, right, they started out from the days of Lipitor, where the largest selling drug was, you know, you get it at the retail pharmacy. Today, it's much different. Drugs come through specialty pharmacy, they're in-office administered, hospital administered, as well as retail pharmacy. And the healthcare system is just so much more complex. So what's driving Compass? Specifically, we have Compass Patient, and then we just introduced Prescriber and National Prescriber in January. They're very early. So the revenue and the deals are coming from Compass Patient now. And what's driving it is that, A, it's one thing, it's easier to purchase. You purchase it by the brand, and you get unlimited access to 80 billion patient records for use with your brand, rather than just buying a slice of data. your own slice of your therapeutic area so this allows you to explore to see what you don't see which is why you're looking at data to see what you could see so that's fundamentally different the other one is it's more complete because we use a different data sourcing strategy that stresses the patient level and more accurate patient matching rather than mostly you know historically the collection from the retail retail pharmacies and then it's the way we deliver it daily So the patient data is updated daily. So you can run different triggering campaigns and you have that fresh data. So it's just a new way of doing things. It's equivalent to, you know, it's like client server and then move to the cloud. It's a new way of doing things and that's what's appealing to people now. What do they do with it? I think the most common thing is what Paul said is finding new patients and therefore finding new prescribers that are treating those patients that you didn't know about and the second one is finding patterns oh i didn't people that are using patients that are using our products that's what else they're doing or patients that aren't using our products or patients that are using our competitors products oh that's what they're doing we provide that visibility and in some cases we're the only one that can provide that visibility because of our data sourcing strategy can often see what's called black products. So a lot of detail there, but I'll end where I start. It's a truly innovative product, and that's what's attracting innovators.

speaker
Stephanie Davis

Hey, Peter, I guess just on that note, the more we go to digital pharma marketing, the more that real-timeness of the data becomes incredibly important to try to kind of be nimble on the strategy. Is that accelerating the growth at all, or is this something that you always saw the demand kind of separate from the digital pharma marketing trends?

speaker
Peter

I would say encompass what's probably the biggest accelerator is just understanding the patient. The timeliness is important for certain use cases, the daily data. But probably right now the biggest one is like, oh, my goodness, I didn't know that's what patients were doing with our product. Or I didn't know that those prescribers were prescribing our product or weren't prescribing our product. So it's these basic things that I think the industry has grown up a little bit to think that they can't get that information. And now they can. So that's what's driving it.

speaker
Stephanie Davis

All right. Thank you for the insights.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
Brian Peterson

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. So, Paul, it's great to see Vault CRM going live in the wins this quarter. As you talk to customers and they're going through their migration decisions, I'm curious, how big of a deal do you think general availability is? Or do you think that full functionality later this year may be a bigger swing factor? I'm effectively looking to get more perspective on any key functional points that customers are looking for in Volterra?

speaker
Paul

Yeah, the Golage that we have and the full functionality are important to those customers, to customers that are considering migrating. But I would say what's more important to them is our direction and our innovation. What they're thinking about, they have enough comfort level. They've operated around Viva long enough to know that when we say we're going to deliver on something from a product standpoint, we deliver. And these are great proof points. So it just extends that pattern. But the decision is really about, it's the innovation that we're delivering. It's some of the things that I talked about earlier with this new way of kind of bringing together different teams, allowing them to collaborate better, solving the content supply chain challenge. Stephanie talked about digital marketing. To do digital marketing well, you need a lot of content. It needs to be personalized. We're in a very unique position to do that because CRM is now on Vault, just like PromoMaps is on Vault, and we're going to connect those together in a very unique way. So it's about innovation, and it's about making it easy to get there. But, of course, having live customers doesn't hurt.

speaker
Peter

Yeah. I think the live customers really are the proof point, and today we have smaller customers live because they can purchase it and go live quickly. I think the larger customers, many of them, they're eager to see when some of those three top 20s are live, how are they liking it? What was the process like to get there? What would they have changed? What would they have done differently? So it's always like that. It's a reference selling. I think that'll be a big milestone when some of the large customers are live now. They have to go through the migration, which will start next year. So that's going to take a little bit of time.

speaker
Brian Peterson

Great. I appreciate the color. And Tim, I know you get a lot of detail on some of the moving parts on the guidance, but as it relates to the pipeline that you mentioned moving from kind of mid-year to the end of the year, was there any commonality by product or customer segment that drove that? Or people may be looking at larger deals and saying, hey, they're going to take smaller bites of the apple. We'd just love to maybe get some qualitative color on what's going on behind the scenes there.

speaker
Gunnar Hansen

Thanks, guys.

speaker
Tim

Yeah. Hey, Brian. As we said earlier, that was mostly in the enterprise area. And I wouldn't say there's any commonalities. These are, you know, Peter mentioned this as related to one of the questions on, you know, the clinical wins that we had in the quarter. These are more deal-specific, company-specific factors that drove some of this. Now, whether or not or how much of a percent of the AI disruption Peter had mentioned plays into that. You know, that may be a common factor across some of these deals, Brian, but nothing specific beyond that, I would say, was a common thread amongst the deals that we saw move later in the year.

speaker
Brian

Excellent.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
David Windley

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to ask you one on margin. You seem to be a little ahead, I think, of Target, certainly ahead of the street in the quarter, and mentioned some timing of hiring. I wondered if you could talk about whether the cost savings or to what extent the cost savings were sustainable, durable savings versus just timing of adding costs, like maybe hiring that might need to come back later in the year and in the next fiscal year. Thanks.

speaker
Tim

Yeah, so as it relates to margin year, right, I think it was a very good performance in Q1. And as you saw in our full year guide, David, we left operating income at the same level, even though revenue is coming down. I do think over the last couple of quarters, you'd heard us talk about very focused hiring. You know, one of the, I think the hallmarks of Viva is being an incredibly efficient company and being, you know, Peter and I would talk about sort of lean teams. And I do think that we are, we're seeing that play out a little bit in some of this focused hiring that you've seen over the last couple of quarters. And the result of that is, is less, to your question, sort of additional costs. Now, of course, we have a large market opportunity in front of us and we'll continue to invest appropriately against that large market opportunity. But what you're seeing is a very efficient company deliver a margin result.

speaker
David Windley

Great, thanks for that. And let's follow up, slightly different topic. You mentioned in the prepared remarks a couple of different areas where you're kind of breaking into what sounds like incremental, I'll call them not brand new, but incremental client bases like the Vault CRM medical device client that you mentioned and in Vault Basics moving down into smaller biotech. Are these incremental PAM opportunities or would these be things that you would have basically already included and contemplated in previous discussions?

speaker
Paul

Yeah, let me take those. Let me address the MedTech one first. That was an interesting one. That's a MedTech company that is committed to Valve CRM. It will be one of our largest new deals as they scale to their full deployment. This is a company that operates like a pharma company. Their selling model is not unlike a pharma company. This is a conversion from custom Salesforce. The company has been talking to us for a number of years. They've wanted to use Viva CRM. but we weren't able to sell it to them. So this is one that now took advantage of the opportunity of us moving to Vault, and they get everything that we're able to offer in Vault CRM. So that's an exciting one. There are other companies like that, but that's a subset of the overall MedTech CRM market. And then you mentioned Vault Basics. And Vault Basics is about these very small companies and being able to get them started on something that we run and operate for them. There is no implementation. It's very efficient. It's efficient for them. We're giving them access to the very best software in a very efficient way. All of these are included in the overall market opportunity that we talk about. We talk about our total TAM. It's not additive to that. It's growing into that. Excellent. Thank you.

speaker
Peter

I would say on that vault basics, I'll just chime in there. This is Peter. That's a super interesting area. I'm very excited about that for these companies under 200 employees to get Viva vault systems with no implementation cost and to be able to run on our processes. So we're not asking them, how would you like to configure processes, et cetera. They're just moving right on to industry standard Viva processes We couldn't address that end of the market very well before. Now we can. And then the companies can graduate to full vault. It's as if you could start with QuickBooks and then you could just flip the switch and graduate to SAP and start that SAP implementation. That would be crazy, right? That's what we're doing with Vault Basics. And surprisingly, yes, Paul's right. It's included in our overall $13 billion R&D TAM. But this segment of Vault Basics is actually It's actually about $100 million segment or maybe even a little more that we couldn't address before. So super excited about it. And just a little more color. You know, we have four values in the company. Staff ranked, it's do the right thing. That's about, you know, integrity, customer success, employee success. And the fourth one is speed. That's about getting things done quickly and correctly the first time if you can. Vault Basics, that idea was started in the second half of last year, less than 12 months ago, and to accomplish that already with these customers, that's tremendous. And then we have to remember that the decision, the announcement to go to Vault CRM from the Salesforce platform was only announced 18 months ago, and the decision was just shortly before that. Now we have hundreds of the product team working on Vault CRM, hundreds of people. We have Viva CRM successfully in stability mode, three enterprise, you know, top 20s committed and multiple customers live. So that, I think, that gives me a lot of optimism. I always thought we could slow down our speed, you know, we would get bigger and our speed would slow down. Turns out we're going pretty fast. So I'm glad you asked about Vault Basics and it reminded me of Vault CRM. So there you go. You got more than you bargained for with that question. How about that?

speaker
Brian

Thank you. Appreciate that. All right.

speaker
Operator

The next question comes from the line of DJ Hines with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

speaker
Paul

Hey, guys. Peter Paul, I don't think we've had the chance to speak with you since the expanded Salesforce IQvia partnership was announced to co-develop their Life Sciences Cloud. It's an impossible question to answer given we don't really know what that product is going to look like. But what's the industry chatter been surrounding that? How should we think of that as a potential longer-term threat? Any caller would be helpful.

speaker
Paul

Yeah. Hey, DJ, I can take that. So you're right. For those that haven't heard about it, you read it happened in the quarter. And I think Acuvia announced that Salesforce has licensed OCE with the intention, the rights to use OCE with the intention of using it to build their future CRM product based on top of. So that's what the arrangement looks like. I was a little bit surprised, but honestly, given that Salesforce announced a future CRM and they're going to build it on a product that hasn't worked well in the marketplace. OCE has played out over the last six or seven years and the product hasn't gained any traction. It hasn't worked well for big customers. So from that standpoint, from a product strategy standpoint, it seems like a little bit more like a hindrance than it may be an accelerator. The other thing is, I heard some customers talking about it, mentioning it at Summit. Summit's a good place for us to check the pulse of customers, obviously share everything that we're doing in our innovation. I guess the market chatter was also a little bit surprised. I would say it was lukewarm to slightly negative, and mainly for the same reason, right? The industry is well aware of the history of IQV and OCE in the marketplace. So, I would say to answer your question from an overall impact standpoint, I don't really see any impact either from a product or a go-to-market standpoint. It's not something that I see as material and potentially even more of a distraction for our competitors.

speaker
Peter

Yeah, okay. The one specific one I heard was, I don't talk to every customer at Summit, but a couple for sure, not quite a few, the ones that the small companies that you had heard of somebody been on OCE, went with OCE, they're not happy about that because now that IQV is kind of getting out of that and there's not a smooth way to get to the Salesforce thing. So that's just one specific thing I heard as well.

speaker
Paul

Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. And I was also, I was a little surprised you had eight wins. Granted, these are mid-market customers with Viva CRM right before Vault CRM was set to go live. Was that just the functionality wasn't fully there on Vault CRM, which pushed them to choose Viva CRM? Help me understand what happened there.

speaker
Paul

Yeah, it was based on, to some extent, based on their requirements. And Yeah, obviously they know we're going to Vault CRM and the move for those companies when the timing is right from Viva CRM to Vault CRM is really a non-issue. It's not going to be a big deal, right? So it's not that big of a deal for a company. Even starting two months ago on Viva CRM, that transition will be quite easy. So not such a big deal, but that'll be the last one. So going forward, everything will be, as we mentioned, on Vault CRM.

speaker
Paul

Yeah, get them over the finish line, into the family, and then we'll move them over when the time's right. That's right.

speaker
Peter

Yeah, I think it's really driven by the customer choice, too. Remember, some of these companies, they're launching their products for the first time. Wow, is that a stressful time. They know Viva CRM so much. They know it absolutely works. They know they can migrate later to Vault CRM. They know they have five years to do it. So for some of them, it's just a de-risking strategy.

speaker
Paul

Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you for the call.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
Jack Wallace

Hi, Tim. Thanks for taking my questions. You wanted to talk about some of the big deals that you have out there. Obviously, you can't win all of the top 20, say, in the next quarter for the EDC or CDMS deals. But as we're starting to merge timelines here, With that pipeline as well as the migration on the CRM platform to Vault, are there conversations happening at the highest levels within your largest customers talking about migrating to the Vault platform on both sides of the house in and around the same time and in effect to have a common data architecture for a broader AI strategy? Thank you.

speaker
Peter

Yeah, the real straightforward answer there is no, we actually don't see that, really. The decisions in the commercial area are kind of made by the commercial team. The decisions in the clinical area are made by the clinical team. The decisions in the safety area are made by the safety team. Compass data, that's different. There are some companies that have a pretty VIVA-aligned strategy, so I think we get an incremental nudge there, you know, um a little extra i wouldn't say push but a little extra things just get a little easier if they have a a broad viva strategy but you know we have to win each area based on the functions and the merits and the timings in that area and you know i really like that in fact we've set up everything about viva to be that way we need to win the business in each area that ensures we have an excellent product in each area So I like it. It's been one of the keys of our success. We have to win the business in each area. Therefore, sometimes, especially when you're a multi-product company, you have a lot of different products. Boy, the worst thing you could have is to make a sale into an existing customer where your product isn't as good. That's a tremendous net negative for Viva. So we don't want that. So that's how we operate things.

speaker
Jack Wallace

Got it. Thank you, Peter. And then, Tim, this one's for you. Just thinking about some of the changes in billing terms we saw this quarter, and it appears like move to more quarterly had been in anticipation last year. It didn't maybe happen as much as we would have thought. Just the check sizes are getting larger. Should we expect that billing terms over time will become more quarterly versus annual, particularly with your largest customers cutting the largest checks?

speaker
Tim

Yeah, Jack, it's a good question. I don't think we've seen a pattern that aligns to size of deal with the payment term frequency. So I wouldn't necessarily say that that is the pattern we're going towards or the path that we're on. I think these deal frequency, excuse me, payment frequency decisions are very much customer by customer and somewhat area by area.

speaker
Brian Peterson

Got it. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

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

speaker
Craig Hettenbach

Thank you. So services has been weak for over six months now, and you're not the only company seeing an impact. Where do you think customers are with kind of rationalization of projects, and what are some things you're looking at in terms of stabilization and ultimately a recovery? in that business?

speaker
Peter

This is Peter. I'll take that one. Services, we're really in that for customer success. That's where we can do those services and do them profitably. So we're not really looking to optimize revenue there per se. In terms of the customers and when things reach a steady state, there's going to be ebbs and flows as more things go to Viva or more things go to partners. Or as we get more efficient, for example, the customers moving on default basics there, that's super interesting. Now, some of those customers, granted, we wouldn't have got before because we didn't have a product that fit. But some of those customers we might have got on the regular Viva, and that would have been significant services revenue. And all of that services revenue is no longer. We're trading that off for subscription revenue. For this year, the services revenue impact by the timing of these deals. So if we have a large deal that was maybe it was going to start in Q2, but now it's going to start in Q4, that obviously pushes the revenue out. I see no macro level change in our services capability and appetite for customers. It's just in the timing. One of the nice things about these core systems of record is You know, when there's delays, it really just, the demand gets pent up until later because they're not optional things.

speaker
Craig Hettenbach

Got it. That's helpful. And then on the EBC side, for some of the ramping deals you have, just wanted to look for an update on how those are progressing and how you're thinking about contribution kind of through this year and going forward.

speaker
Peter

um i'll take that one tim and then maybe at first then maybe take about contribution uh the projects that we that we sold the big edc deals are are going well um some of them a couple of them i'm thinking about they have their first studies live now when they do their first studies live they pick less complicated studies these are a way to learn and test out their processes most of them have significant milestones coming in the next between the next 12 and 18 months where all their new studies will be live on Viva. There's tight integration, tight communication with our product team and our services team. So I think that's going well. That's helping to improve our product and our services offerings. I'm really very happy with our execution in EDC. In terms of the ramping and how that flows into our financial results, our revenue, Tim, do you want to take that one?

speaker
Tim

Sure. Yeah, I think, as we've said before, on the EDC side, these are typically longer in terms of duration of the original arrangements, and the first couple of years of those arrangements are relatively small. So while there will be some contribution, I don't expect us to see material contribution there, and that's included in the guidance that we've given today.

speaker
Craig Hettenbach

Got it. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

The next question comes from the line of Ryan McDonald with Needham. Please go ahead.

speaker
Ryan McDonald

Hey, thanks for taking the question. This is Matt Sheahan for Needham. Maybe circling back to the data cloud, wanted to ask about Lync. It seems like nice progress there with over 100 customers now and early adopters on your newer products. Where are you attracting these wins from? Are these greenfield opportunities? Are you winning them away from incumbents? And if incumbents, there's a lot of options out there. So just curious what you've seen has been your biggest point of competitive differentiation.

speaker
Peter

That's a good question. I think it is a mix of greenfield and incumbents, which is different than something like a CRM system or a system there, people have those systems, and we're replacing incumbents. Here, sometimes we're replacing incumbents that are just not as – and when we do that, it's because our data quality is far superior, and the software on top of it is far superior. The price is a bit higher maybe than what they're used to before on Lync, but the product is far superior. We invested heavily in that product and that data. And then sometimes, especially for smaller companies, and sometimes even for larger companies, they had no organized system. They would ask a consultant to do some market research and make some reports and things like that. They had no system of reference to go to. So those are the dynamics we see.

speaker
Ryan McDonald

Gotcha. That's helpful. And then maybe just quickly on Vault Basics, got a couple of customers that went live in May. wondering what early feedback has been like and then I guess given the opportunity to land more of these small biotechs that grow alongside them, how heavily do you plan to lean in on this first sort of wait for more macro recovery?

speaker
Peter

Feedback, it's probably a little early to get anything comprehensive feedback. We've gotten good feedback through the cycle. I guess that's the fact that the customers are buying. David Miller, Even though, when the product was quite early they really buy into the concept so far it's been smooth in the first week so but too early to get a lot of concrete feedback. David Miller, And then, in terms of the go forward yeah we think there's there's certainly pipeline there for ball basics and. you know, we're happy about that. I think if interest rates come down some, you know, our funding environments get better, there can be more small biotechs starting up again, and that'll be more for us. But it's really, our focus now is with these customers to fine-tune the process, make the products really, really great, make the process really, really great. And then we have some expansion with WallPay 6.2, some more applications we will put in there, such as our PTMS product, clinical trial management system, and our QMS product. And we'll look for other things to do over time. Vault Basics for Aviva is definitely not a flash in the pan. This is a fundamental thing where we can help the industry grow in the small emerging biotech area, be very profitable for Aviva, and provide a super smooth on-ramp and onto the full vault when you need to. Over time, yes, this is going to apply to CRM. This is going to apply to our commercial products over time. It was a fundamental, just to let you know, I mean, it was a fundamental decision discussed deeply at the board level last year. We view it as really, really important. Interestingly enough, some of our best innovative ideas are actually coming from the vault basics because it's helping us standardize. The standardization is going to help us in all types of areas and help the industry in all types of areas.

speaker
Ryan McDonald

Makes sense. Thanks, Peter.

speaker
Operator

The next question comes from the line of Charles Wright with PD Coward. Please go ahead.

speaker
Charles Wright

Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Hey, Peter, you know, in your prepared comments, you kind of noted that the challenging environment Is causing particularly among your top 50 by farming along with Q4 rather than Q2 and Q3. Can you talk about some of the visibility you have for, you know, sort of that kind of comment here. Is that from just direct communications and conversations with clients that they plan to add solutions, but maybe not till later this year.

speaker
Peter

Yeah, probably the easiest way, this is what your question was about as related to the deal delay that I referenced in the prepared remarks specifically into the R&D and specifically into the large companies, the enterprise top 50 type companies. Yeah, those are based on our actually on our sales forecast, right? On our, these are active opportunities we're, we're managing and maybe have been tracking for a long time. It could be six months, a year, two years, you know, we're tracking these things. So it's, it's based on our, our field teams and our product teams interaction with these customers and based on their best judgment. So it's not a, that's, that's not done by formula, right? That's done by individual discussions.

speaker
Charles Wright

Got it. Understood. And then maybe Tim, um, You know, if we look at billions growth for the balance of the year, it looks like you're basically estimating around 9% to 10% growth. Should we think of that as sort of the benchmark as we think about growth beyond fiscal 25? Is that sort of like a good jumping off point? Because obviously billions growth has been more in the mid-teens of the past year or so. How should we think about this as maybe a new starting point?

speaker
Tim

Yeah, Charles, two things to consider there. Number one, I don't want to imply or give any guidance outside of Fiscal 25 on the call today, but as you think about the billings guidance that we gave today, one thing to consider is our services revenue growth year on year, which, as you know, pretty much every dollar of service revenue shows up in the same year from a billings perspective. That is sitting right now at a low single percent growth. So those would be the two things that I would give more color on as it relates to our billing guidance.

speaker
Charles Wright

So the assumption being that as the services part of the market rebounds, because that is in the current year, you know, that's a 9 to 10, but it's basically kind of artificially impacted this year is the way to think of it.

speaker
Tim

Again, not implying any rebound or any future guidance here, Charles, but this services revenue growth rate relative to historical services revenue is very, very low. And it's back to some of the commentary that Peter put in the remarks, specifically in terms of some of the deal timing that moves to later in the year, which just gives services less days of revenue on those new projects to implement those critical systems.

speaker
Charles Wright

Got it. And Peter, if I could ask one more real quick is, you talked about sort of the funding environment, but, you know, 1K funding for biotech was actually quite strong. Any reason why we haven't yet seen some of that maybe flow through for you guys? Or is that kind of two different things? Maybe some of that money is going more into clinical development versus technology investments?

speaker
Peter

Yeah, I have seen the data about the funding picking up a little bit. As far as I can see, I wouldn't characterize that as quite strong yet. And still the cost of that funding is still relatively high. But there's always a delay, right? There's funding, and when funding gets announced, and then when you put those funds to use, there's always a bit of delay. So if indeed the funding environment is actually getting better, we could see some positive benefits to that, but we haven't seen that yet.

speaker
Operator

Great. Thank you for the comments. The next question comes from the line of Gabriella Borges with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

speaker
spk11

Good afternoon. Thank you. I'll stay on the topic of the last question, which is, Peter, you've been in this industry for some time, and we've been in this sluggish environment in spending for a couple of years now. What do you think has to change or what are your customers telling you they're looking for in order to get to a better state of spending and to see maybe a resumption in some of these mission-critical projects kind of come back to steady state? Thank you.

speaker
Peter

Yeah. I mean, to be fair, we are still growing and customers are still doing things. I can think of a lot of customers and the important projects that they're doing, so I don't want to imply at all that things are stagnant. As far as the macro environment of what could make the industry do better, I think it's probably the things we talked about. If the interest rates take a favorable turn, if some of these global conflicts get resolved in a positive way, I think if we The industry navigates the IRA successfully a little bit more, you know, a little bit more political and legislative stability. Those are the things that help the industry. So it's not that complicated, really. They want stability, predictability, and it's a capital-intensive industry, especially at the smaller end, which feeds a lot of the innovation. So it is an industry that's a little sensitive to interest rates.

speaker
spk11

Yes, that makes sense. Thank you. The follow-up I have is on CDMS, and more specifically, how you're thinking about developing functionality across the different phases of a clinical trial, so phase one, phase two, et cetera. Share with us how that functionality is progressing and how you feel about the completeness of the solution across the different phases of trial. Thank you.

speaker
Peter

In terms of the clinical data management area, we have multiple products in there. We have, for example, our EBC product to collect the patient data. We have randomization and trial supply management. And we have E-Pro to collect the data directly from patients. All of those will work across all phases and do work across all phases today. So we have that complete functionality that works for all the different phases. But those products are in different levels of maturity, so it's really about the complexity of the trial, which generally you get in phase 2s and phase 3s and some phase 4s, pretty complex. And we can handle all those trials, but with EDC, that's where we have the most proven track record. And so I would say it's the most mature product in the clinical data management area. The RTSM is, I would say, the next most proven. And ePro is the younger product, and it just takes time to mature and for customers to have the reference selling model start to work. So we're beyond, I guess, to answer directly, we're beyond that stage where we could only work for certain phases of trial. We can work for all phases of trial for all of our products at this time.

speaker
spk11

I appreciate the call. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Thanks. Your next question comes from the line of Jaylenja Singh with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

speaker
Brian

Thank you, and thanks for taking my questions. I missed the first few minutes of the call, so apologies if you already covered this. First, I wanted to ask about the pricing environment. There have been some discussions that pharma companies have been tighter than usual on pricing negotiations given the macro environment. Have you guys seen any of that as come up with a new role, even purchasing new business. And as you look across your portfolio, are there certain areas where you see less or more competitive pricing environment?

speaker
Peter

I'll take that one. No change in the pricing dynamic. And no, there's no particular area where we see less or more. So it's business as usual there. We have to make a great product, prove the value, but no particular change.

speaker
Brian

Okay. And then my quick follow-up, any update on the permanent CFO search process, any update on timeline or skill set experience focus would be helpful.

speaker
Peter

The search continues and it's going well. I feel it's an orderly process. We're certainly talking to good candidates. I'm not going to disclose specific progress, but I would say we're active in it and we are making progress. And we'll give you an update when we can.

speaker
Brian

Great. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. That concludes the question and answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Peter Gassner. CEO, for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

speaker
Peter

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

speaker
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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