"I think the biggest thing comes from the rep reduction because the other things where you have data in the cloud master data management, you as a pharma company are likely to outsource that. You don't want to deal with the set. And if you outsource it to a partner of trust, I think the hurdles to change an established partnership just for the price of minus 10%, for example, no pharma executive would take the risk to do that because it's always a matter of change management, unsecurity, if you're satisfied, you keep what you have. And for that, I think Veeva as an advantage on a strong market position not to get substituted easily."
我认为最大的挑战来自于减少代表的数量，因为在云端主数据管理方面，作为制药公司，您可能会选择外包。您不想亲自处理这些事务。如果您将其外包给值得信赖的合作伙伴，我认为仅仅为了降低 10%的价格而改变一个已建立的合作关系是非常冒险的，因为这总是涉及变更管理和不确定性。如果您对现状感到满意，您就会选择保留现有的合作关系。因此，我认为 Veeva 在强大的市场地位上具有优势，不容易被替代。

"I think it will be a slow burn, to be honest. I don't think it's going to have any material short-term business. I mean, they've been talking about the death of the salesman for, you know, however long. And the other thing about pharma is they talk about how they want to transform and all those things, and actually, what they actually do is not too much of that, really. If you look at the way the business model, it doesn't change that quickly as an industry, you know. So, unless there's something really disruptive happens from a technology perspective, like Google or one of those things. But even so, I can't see a basic business model impacting Veeva's business in the short to medium term. And they're also pretty well tuned in to that and well aligned. So Veeva have got a good understanding of this market. They're pretty seriously tuned in to their primary market."
老实说，我认为这将是一个缓慢的发展过程。我不认为它会在短期内带来实质性的业务。毕竟，他们谈论销售员的死亡已经很久了。制药行业的另一个问题是，他们总是说想要转型，做出各种改变，但实际上，他们的行动并没有太大变化。如果你观察商业模式，作为一个行业，它的变化并不会那么快。因此，除非从技术角度出现一些真正颠覆性的事件，比如谷歌之类的公司。但即便如此，我也看不到基本的商业模式在短期到中期内对 Veeva 的业务产生影响。他们对此也非常敏感，并且与之保持良好的协调。 所以 Veeva 对这个市场有很深的理解，他们对主要市场非常关注。"

"I think so. You’re on a mission to change pharma by bringing technology and leveraging technology. If you want to be becoming Amazon of the consumer industry, then you got to get some radical thought processes going. If you're surrounded by the people who believe what we do is right, then I don't think the innovation will continue to flourish. At the initial phase of a company and a product, it made sense because they needed to create a product that was well-suited for the pharma industry, fitting to the regulations. But now you have a product, a base that complies and fits into the regulation aspect of industry. Now if you're going to leapfrog from here, you got to just go to a different extent to imagine things differently, which will only happen, by bringing people who would less appreciate on how pharma works and bring crazy ideas coming from different industry. It's how, at least I think, is that next phase of Veeva as they struggle to expand given the peak shares, they have achieved in many different market segments and looking for renewal kind of relationships and maybe expanding on consulting. But again, upselling their products, not necessarily and solving customer issues. I've used Veeva Consulting, but again, their imagination was maybe there is another Veeva product you can use, but that's not the customer experience. That's another paid upselling process of Veeva. Paying hourly dollar rates comparable to top four or top six consulting firms, that's a very low ROI. I'd rather go to a consulting firm who is product neutral."
我认为是这样。你正在通过引入和利用技术来改变制药行业。如果你想成为消费品行业的亚马逊，就必须进行一些激进的思维。如果你周围的人都相信我们所做的是正确的，那么我认为创新就不会继续蓬勃发展。在公司和产品的初始阶段，这样做是有意义的，因为他们需要创造一个符合制药行业法规的产品。但现在你已经有了一个符合行业法规的产品和基础。 现在如果你想从这里跳跃，你必须以不同的方式去想象事物，这只有通过引入对制药行业了解较少的人以及来自其他行业的创新想法才能实现。我认为这就是 Veeva 的下一个阶段，因为他们在许多市场细分中已经达到了高峰份额，现在正在寻找更新的合作关系，可能还在扩展咨询服务。但再次强调，他们推销的产品并不一定能解决客户的问题。我使用过 Veeva 的咨询服务，但他们的想法似乎只是认为你可以使用另一个 Veeva 产品，但这并不是客户所期望的体验。这只是 Veeva 的另一种付费推销方式。 支付与前四大或前六大咨询公司相当的每小时费用，投资回报率非常低。我更愿意选择一家产品中立的咨询公司。"

"Sure. First of all, well, I mean, so I'm going to kind of walk backwards here. Number one is like with their customer reference data, with OpenData, when you have good reference data, you can make better calls, right? So a lot of rep time, and depending on who you talk to, somewhere between 4% and 25% of calls are wasted up because you showed up to the wrong place, showed up to the wrong doctor. So having good data really starts making your calls more efficient. And whether that's the reference data or the where to show up, or whether that's the integrated data, like they're bringing in from Crossix with who to see, that's going to make you more efficient because you're going to be able to use data to prioritize who your reps can go see. And even like if you look at the use case of GSK, where about 5 or 6 years ago, GSK stopped compensating reps for low-value scripts. So like when -- if your script is on formulary, GSK doesn't give a rep credit for that and only give them credit for scripts that are not on formulary. And so, in that example, Veeva could help you understand which doctors accept which payers against which formularies, all that sort of thing. So through their MyInsights package in CRM, they can help drive those analytics to call planning. And then, of course, just the straight-up tactical management of call planning, super-efficient, right? Like instead of having to roll through one doctor at a time or roll through one tactic at a time, you can just plan out a bunch of templates, you can schedule all that stuff. I mean it's almost like a microcosm of growth marketing tactics. Like if you went to any growth marketing department in Silicon Valley, right, for any app and said, "Hey, how are you going to go attack your market?" They would show you the growth marketing tactics they're going to use, e-mail sequences, social listening, all that stuff, right? And they're going to be able to track all that stuff back to your performance, and they're going to send you down different workflows based on what you do as a target. Veeva can do that, Veeva can do that now. And that tactical planning is only going to be more important as they start applying things like, like if you look at like the Andi product, right, the artificial intelligence-based products, there's a lot of room to grow there. And my favorite company in that space is probably Aktana, but they're doing decision support. So it goes from, hey, go see this doctor, to go send this doctor this message, to I'm going to send a whole series of workflow triggers, all the way down to, eventually, it's just going to start doing it for people, right? I mean like Veeva has fully realized that it's sort of like a full suit of armor, is going to be a fully automated, artificially intelligent mechanism to just email, meet, distribute information, distribute promotional content, stay in touch. Like at some point, you would even have to imagine that Veeva would just tell you what to do next and pop up a Zoom meeting in front of you and say, okay, you're meeting with Dr. Smith in 5 minutes. You just sent him these 15 things over the last 3 months. Whether you knew it or not, it had your name on it."
当然。首先，我想说的是，我将稍微倒着说。第一点是，关于他们的客户参考数据，使用开放数据时，拥有良好的参考数据可以帮助你做出更好的决策，对吧？因此，很多销售代表的时间，取决于你与谁交谈，电话中大约有 4%到 25%的时间是浪费的，因为你去了错误的地方，见了错误的医生。因此，拥有良好的数据确实可以提高你的电话效率。无论是参考数据还是去哪里，或者是集成的数据，比如他们从 Crossix 引入的关于见谁的数据，这都会让你更高效，因为你可以利用数据来优先安排你的代表去见谁。 而且如果你看看 GSK 的案例，大约在 5 或 6 年前，GSK 停止了对低价值处方的代表补偿。因此，当你的处方在药物清单上时，GSK 不会给代表任何信用，只会对不在药物清单上的处方给予信用。在这个例子中，Veeva 可以帮助你了解哪些医生接受哪些支付方以及对应哪些药物清单等信息。通过他们在 CRM 中的 MyInsights 工具，他们可以帮助推动这些分析以进行电话规划。当然，电话规划的直接战术管理也是非常高效的，对吧？ 就像不必一次只处理一个医生或一个策略，你可以规划出多个模板，安排所有这些事情。这几乎就像是增长营销策略的缩影。如果你去硅谷的任何增长营销部门，问他们：“你们打算如何攻占市场？”他们会展示将要使用的增长营销策略，比如电子邮件序列、社交聆听等等。他们能够将这些策略的效果追踪到你的表现，并根据你的行为将你引导到不同的工作流程。Veeva 现在就能做到这一点。 而且这种战术规划在他们开始应用一些新技术时只会变得更加重要。例如，如果你看看安迪产品，基于人工智能的产品，这里有很大的发展空间。我最喜欢的公司可能是 Aktana，他们专注于决策支持。从“去见这个医生”到“给这个医生发信息”，再到“我将发送一系列工作流程触发器”，最终，它将开始为人们自动完成这些任务。我的意思是，Veeva 已经完全意识到，这就像是一套完整的盔甲，将成为一个完全自动化的人工智能机制，能够自动发送电子邮件、召开会议、分发信息、推广内容并保持联系。 在某个时刻，你可能会想象 Veeva 会告诉你接下来该做什么，并在你面前弹出一个 Zoom 会议，告诉你，好的，你将在 5 分钟后与史密斯博士会面。过去 3 个月里，你向他发送了这 15 件资料。无论你是否意识到，这些资料上都有你的名字。"

"There's a couple of things that Veeva has done, and other companies do as well. Veeva has really done this very well. They solicit information, and suggestions, and feedback from the customers to always improve their application. On any development cycle they target 40%, I believe it's 40%, of the new features and functionalities to come from customer needs requests and suggestions. The other 60% come from internal, the company. So again, the other 60% come from an internal within the company. And the company is now filled with experts who have between five to 25 years in industry. So, they know what the industry was lacking, the pain points that the industry was experiencing throughout the early 2000s, and even early 2010s. So, they're building on that and they're always improving and increasing the application's functionality, breadth and depth. Some other value propositions are the ease of scalability within a company. Because the company does not have to own any software on premise, instead they're licensing it from Veeva, they can stand up an entire new sales team. They can transition between different teams, or different organizations internally very quickly, without having to buy hardware, software, etc. It's a matter of licensing. So, there's also that total cost of ownership, which is typically significantly less in the Veeva model, if you will, because they're not buying servers and data warehouses. A company, let’s just call it pharma company A, they can lease essentially lease the software, or subscribe to the software. It's always maintained. It's always backed up. It's always made compliant. So a month they say, by user, by headcount. It's always up and running and they have support for that. So it's saving head count, so IT support. And it provides industry leading applications, features, functionality to help them do the job of promoting and selling, promoting their therapy or their drug, and selling it and getting it in front of physicians."

"It depends on what they have. So they might use Veeva to put pieces together, like they might have CTMS, but they're using Veeva TMF. They might have a TMF, but they're using Veeva CTMS. We have sponsors that are kind of like that. They have Veeva TMF, but they don't have like the CTMS. So they want to use our CTMS with their TMF, and we have to talk them into using part of our system and part of theirs."

"I think Veeva has been trying for the last five to seven years to really be that platform solution for clinical, for regulatory, for all those sort of bespoke and one-off the point solutions. They've done a good job of putting the applications out there. But I think where they come a little bit short is the interconnectivity and also the licensing of them. Because, for example, let's say clinical had like eTMF and then CTMS, in my opinion, and I've been working at Sage for three years, and I've been helping my R&D folks, and that's the clinical side, their frustration is like they don't have like one license for all the clinical applications. They're all sort of different. You have to switch between them. And in other words, it'd be nice to have one application that can serve everything for the clinical trial, from end-to-end like trial needs. And while Veeva can do that with four to five different applications, from start-up to conclusion to submission to the FDA, it's not a one application fits all solution. So everything is on one platform, but it's not one application. So while you may have like your trial master file application, which is a great application, in your CTMS or clinical trial solution, which is great, they're different platforms, and they take different licenses. So I understand the business model of doing it, but from a consumer perspective, it can be a little frustrating to have to switch between and know the difference between A and B and where I go to do this versus having everything sort of on one dashboard and sort of double-click in and gets where you need to get relatively quickly."

"That essentially is the pitch across all of the R&D products at its highest level. I mean the sooner that you can get a product from clinical through to commercial, the quicker you can get that through, then the more time you'll have then on your patent to sell it. So that in essence, is the value prop across all of R&D. Obviously, it's specific then to each product when you drill into it. So as other organizations adopt, it certainly provides a huge amount of credibility. Also, it gives other pharmaceutical companies comfort because essentially, if there's any bugs or bumps in the road with the product as it's launched, the early adopters go through that and tease that out for the other organizations so it makes it an easier decision. There's a saying in pharmaceutical companies and certainly in IT circles in pharmaceutical companies, "You don't get fired for buying Veeva." So when you've got competitors that even if they are very innovative, even if they are using AI, all these other kinds of things, they have one stand-alone product versus someone that has a suite of products that may not connect today but may be able to connect tomorrow, it makes it an easier decision. So I'm not saying it's going to put pressure, but it just makes it an easier decision. Are you going to buy an unknown or are you going to buy someone that fair enough, the product might be lesser known, but they've delivered on all these other products that they said they would?"

"I'd say I have about varying degrees of experience with Veeva over the course of time. I'd say for about the last 10 years, and if I were to do chronological order, my first experience with Veeva was an end user of the actual system itself. Whether that is being able to review documents for pharmaceutical organizations and in a compliant promotional platform, that's called Veeva Vault. We utilize the Vault to be able to review promotional materials that get sent to the FDA into their OPDP 2253 form that sits on file. We go through this entire legal regulatory medical process. My first entree to Veeva was really the promotional review material. The second part was when I was in sales, I was an end user for Veeva CRM. That's where you hold all of your customer master data on targeting. All the physician names, addresses. So started there as an end user, then became middle line manager of leading people in teams who use the product. Now I'm a P&L owner where we're making OpEx and CapEx decisions, whether or not to utilize Veeva enterprise wide or bring in another or another Veeva product. Which recently we've brought on Veeva Engage, which is a virtual online detailing platform that augments and supplements our Veeva CRM system. If you're a physician and you're somebody who we'd normally call on in person Sales rep gets in their car, goes into an office. Now we're using Veeva Engage to do a virtual detailing through a compliant platform. I think what Veeva provides is a compliant controlled space that our legal counsel and compliance officers feel comfortable because it's captured in the right way and it's not as free range as things like email or like WebEx. It's a very controlled environment that we feel comfortable with. That's my experience with end user to leading people to now, like, "All right, let's make a decision whether or not we want to use Veeva or Service Cloud," or prior to the consolidation, it was like, "Do we use Zinc MAPS or do we use Veeva Vault? Now Veeva had since purchased Zinc MAPS, now is from my vantage point, not only is like probably the most prolific commercial tool for pharma, it's probably a corner of the market in many, many regards."

"Yes. So Veeva has started to do that and their angle is a bit unique. I'm very familiar with Veeva and knew them from the CRO side of things. So what Veeva offers is they're developing a CTMS system, but what they really offer is a document management system or electronic regulatory. And what they do is they offer it free the sites. The interesting thing is the reason that they can offer it free to sites is because they're really trying to sell it to the CROs and pharma where they upcharge significantly. And basically, why that's important is because the CROs and sponsors have to keep a master trial file for every document, every communication that happens on that study as part of their submission to get their drug approved. And if you'd offer this free to site, then that feeds directly into this master trial management file. So it makes it easier for the CROs and sponsors in the end to submit their application for approval of their drug when they really not had to do any of the work and they charge them significantly for that. So they don't have to charge the sites."

"I'm not sure specifically. I can only speak to probably the quality suite. And as I recall, the licensing costs for a full user. There are no read-only users in QMS. The full user license costs, I think, are pretty similar. I think once you're on an enterprise license agreement, that changes, you're paying a fixed rate. There might be some difference there between like an enterprise license for QualityDocs versus QMS. I do believe Training is less."

"Exactly. And how to sell in to those hospitals and formularies. So the relationships between the different physicians, who the key opinion leader is, what are his or her links to other pharma companies based on that's where the Veeva Link comes in because you'll see how tied they are to different pharma companies. Because of their research portfolio."

"So Veeva, part of their go-to-market strategy is that reference selling. They have the Veeva summits every year, a European version, and a U.S. version, they do a commercial and they do an R&D one. The whole model there really is to get customers up to speed about their journey and talk about it and really reference-sell from that point. Typically, when there are press releases, announcements from other companies, there's typically an incentive to do that, and that's typically part of the commercial negotiations as well when whatever deal has been worked on in that as well. To give you a perspective, one of the accounts that I managed was very cautious not to put all their eggs in one basket because that's not a good thing either. So if you're all in, in commercial, all in, in R&D, you're potentially leaving yourself exposed. You're potentially leaving yourself with not a lot of leverage with the vendors. So they were very apprehensive as they used to say, painting the whole organization orange because they felt that it might be wise."

"That's correct, and there are big pharma companies like Novartis that used Veeva for CRM and now don't use Veeva for CRM today. But for small biotech companies and emerging biotech companies, Veeva is a very attractive proposition. Especially when Veeva's default is we only want to sign a one year contract with you, because we want to win your business again next year. And they know that nobody's going to leave easily because of the cost to move. But if I'm a small biotech company and my model is to get acquired, I'm very happy to not have those kinds of investments."

"Yes, certainly. I mean I remember at the time I was there; we were going after the last sort of big beasts that hadn't in Europe that hadn't moved on to Veeva CRM. And over the last few years, I think most of them, they were like six or seven companies that moved over to Veeva, made the switch to the platform from legacy solutions, and that was where a lot of the big growth was. So my view is that it's unlikely that we will see big CRM seat growth, as you say, the penetration is super high, where Veeva could see good growth on that side of things is better penetration of smaller market segments, SMB, particularly in Europe where the market is very fragmented. So companies will have different solutions in different countries. They haven't invested in them for a long time. There aren't a lot of good, smaller players in CRM, unlike traditional CRM or CRM that you and I probably use, so there's still opportunity there for Veeva to go after, and they’ve restructured as far as I'm aware, they restructured their go-to-market in Europe to sort of take into account those more mop-up accounts where there still is an opportunity for decent growth. So what I would say is it's different to when you're able to take on, it’s the old 80%-20%. 80% of the market sits in the top 20 pharma companies in terms of reps. The other dynamic in commercial, which I think is hurting a lot of companies is that there's a potential reduction in the salesforce expected. So that sort of total seat market will decline because a lot of pharma companies are taking their reps online or shifting their model. It used to be back in 2010 to 2015, the model was known as reach and frequency, hit as many, get in front of as many physicians as possible and speak to them as much as possible, and that would be obviously like a one-to-one relationship between that and your sales. That started to shift. COVID accelerated that trend to more of a, let’s say it is a multichannel, that's a buzzword. You see a lots in the industry, multichannel or omnichannel marketing approach rather than sort of rep-lead sales. I think that's hiding a movement to more targeted sales. So sales like MSLs, some Medical Science Liaison treatment to get more complicated. So I think that's an area where there's growth relative to the decline in the number of traditional sales reps, which brings up the sort of the bulk of the seats but also, I'm seeing pharma companies sort of redeploy them as well. So that's one dynamic that sort of movement to more online movement to marketing movement to remote detailing, it's called when you're sharing sort of information about a new drug. On the other hand, pharma is low to get out of that too much. They like it. It's safe, it's familiar. But I do think you're seeing that reduction in seat volume and the high penetration that Veeva has, I think, capped the growth in that side of the business. Hence, the significant investment in other products, add-on products, digital products, and data products. And I think that's where I would anticipate the growth to be. So the CRM seats for me, I think, are or just the market trend is in favor and the penetration is so high, as you said, that it's probably the investment in the data offerings, I should say, that are probably the most critical drivers of Veeva's growth."

"Yes, I think that's a really good analogy. I mean the other way I think of it is it replaces paper, period."

"Yes. I think that Veeva has had a lot of success. At least a couple of years ago, they had engagements with 19 of the top 20 pharma companies globally. They're pretty entrenched. Sticking costs are relatively low. CIOs, CMOs and CFOs are trying to figure out where to squeeze out cost to improve top line and bottom line. I think this would be an area that would at least be up for evaluation. Veeva likes to have longer-term contracts to the three- to five-year route with their clients. It would be a wait-and-see approach. But I do think that if Salesforce was able to build something that was more specific towards the needs of life sciences. There would be strong interest in the pharma, MedTech, biotech, life science verticals. There will be interest to better understand an alternative option given that Veeva really dominates the industry today."

"I think that's very true because if you think about it, you have, let's say, lung cancer. I just gave you the example of lung cancer before. You might have X number of drugs in development, right, all of which you may or may not want to move forward with because of what does that cohort mean in terms of overall revenue, right? If it's not a multibillion-dollar opportunity, big pharma doesn't really prioritize that. And they may offload that to smaller biopharma that would then look to commercialize those particular therapies because they can put in the time and effort in managing the opportunity. They in turn would need Veeva systems, right, on the Commercial Cloud end of things, et cetera. Their VAMM module, precision medicine module, whatever you want to call it, on a go-forward basis to manage their team collaboration. So, I think it sort of becomes an ecosystem. There are so many potential drugs in development now, I mean, dozens that are all targeted by some of these larger pharma companies that they won't probably be able to commercialize all of them because their job is to focus on the biggest opportunities. So, in a virtuous cycle, they probably offload them, they out-license them to other biopharma companies would then have the same needs for Veeva as the larger ones do, but again, in a smaller package. So, I think Veeva has got a great opportunity going forward. Again, good business model, sticky solution. They might run into some challenges right now, with the current global climate being what it is. But yes, I think they hold a leadership position, obviously, for a very good reason."

"For us, what stands out, you have this orchestrated customer engagement and a lot of different things which IQVIA keeps bringing and tries to combine. I think closed-loop marketing in the context of Veeva Cloud is definitely outstanding because they're able to combine the technology with the foundation of reps data, bring in all the content they've been used, documents that has been leveraged, customer reactions. And all of that combined, this data harmonization piece works pretty well because we get to know customer reactions, behaviors through the insights Veeva is able to generate. I think obviously, some of these tools, like the outlet of these tools, for example, leveraging Veeva for Veeva Loop for customer calls. Pretty easy getting on a call, Veeva call to the customers doing detailing. Those features are attractive. I don't know what else. I think e-mail customization is one of the areas, of course. So Veeva Link and particularly, I think, I haven't seen anything that beats Veeva Link so far. For example, I've used Veeva Link in the context of oncology, and I've seen tremendous value they bring by, say, taking a KOL in Japan and help us orchestrate whom this KOL is engaged more often with, what kind of areas do they engage on? What hierarchy in terms of science, scientific thoughts, generally global KOLs, they follow? What would tend to make them get interested? Would it be clinical trial, real-life applications or patient case studies based on some of the work they have done and the mining it does about the doctor and the research they put together? And then all of that been crystallized at the customer level, which allows us to define a customer level strategy, or a cluster level strategy based on their inclination of science, et cetera. I hope this is specific what you're looking for, but that definitely stands out a lot for me, for Veeva Link, big fan."

"You would think so. The reality is to the pharma companies, yes, they are a big name. To clinical trial sites, no. They still don't know who Veeva is. These are two players in a dance. So Veeva still has a lot of work to do in terms of making themselves known to the clinical trial sites. These are medical research centers and private clinics, and these are like small SMB organizations. Normally what they do is do word-of-mouth. Big customer word-of-mouth, that travels easily to 20 customers, but these are 2,000, 3,000 companies, very difficult. I suspect that's part of the problem."

"Yes, Veeva has some solutions for sort of that area, let's say, but probably not super deep. I would say that think of Veeva as they're a software company at the core. And so, the tech is great. When it comes to data, though, as far as selling data, they're not going to be great at that. What they are going to have a very good read on though, however, is sort of what's going on in the overall market. And that's just from seeing a lot of what's going on in the space in aggregate. Veeva works with everybody and knows what kind of challenges that they're facing or where they're wanting to focus, et cetera, et cetera. And so just think of it as more of like aggregated historical type of information and/or good pulse of what's going on. And to be quite frank with you, you could buy all the data platforms that you want. You can look for all these competitive solutions that you want. Think of that as like giving you like the first step, second step, a good draft. Think about it like how you would use ChatGPT. So, the problem is, any of these data platforms or anything that you go out and buy, it's always going to be dated, and it's all dependent on how many analysts they have and keeping up with things. And I'm sure you can see this in even maybe your personal space, like things change daily in many cases. And so, what I would say is, yes, it would be similar to the way I would think about the competitive space just for Veeva perhaps. Yes, I have tools and things that I could see data on, but to be quite honest, what you have to do is then add human to it and humans that are obsessed on certain things, obsessed on one specific therapeutic area, what's going on, what drugs are coming to market, what's the opportunity, what's getting reimbursed, what's not getting reimbursed, where are there too many competitors in the space. Or there's too many clinical trials going on in the space. Or hey, this company is very interesting and they are developing a lot of new things, et cetera, et cetera, because still at the end of the day, innovation is only happening in small teams. It's not happening in these big giant shops. So, you're still relying on these little biotechs. The problem is just too many to pay attention to. You could have all the data platforms that you want, you still just kind of really dig in. So are there specific data platforms that you're interested in or how good the data is or tell me what your investment thesis is maybe."

"Well, Veeva OEM the CRM part, but they don't OEM the marketing part, because IQVIA have got the whole lot. But Salesforce have a suite, right, which is Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud and Veeva OEMs Sales Cloud. So that's the bit that competes with Marketo and, you know, Marketo and Adobe Campaign and all those kind of things. So Veeva will say, it's different in pharma, it's not joined up. And actually, to some extent they're right, but that doesn't, as I said, from a marketecture point of view, that's not necessarily the way the marketeers in pharma would see it, in my opinion. This plays back to, you know, a little bit to the question you were asking about changes, and if it was true that pharma companies were going to become less dependent on the sales channel. And the reason that Veeva's in such a strong position is because the salesforce in pharma is in such a strong position. If they were becoming more marketing-led, then that would play even more strongly to, you know, the marketing cloud, and IQVIA story and pitch, but the reality is, they're not going there in a hurry. But the story's good."

"Okay, so just from a CRM perspective? Yeah. I can't talk for other companies, of course, but I do know that we wound up using a global platform, so we wanted to roll out across all of the affiliates to get the economies of scale. That was our driver, and I do know, talking to other companies, that that's been their common driver as well. As you become a really big pharma company, I do know that they have done it on a regional basis, so you just have one Veeva version for the US, for example, which has its own set of the regulations. Then you have another one for the European region. You have another one for the Asian region. It all depends on how you structure the orgs, as they call it, and how you choose to implement that organizational structure for Veeva. Some companies, they haven't done it globally. They just do it for some, but I would say, just thinking about it actually, you're right. So, there's probably some growth left there, and there's always a bit of space to grow, but in the smaller companies, if you just have one org, you just roll it out, and there's just one instance of the org and that's it. The bigger companies, yeah, possibly there could be more scope there."

"I think, are still developing. And then they keep on developing. And I think that's a bit where the pressure is coming from, and that's why I said before, it's good that they do enhancements, but then they need to make sure that when they bring an improvement or an enhancement or a new part of it, that it is matured. And, sometimes I say, well, I'm not sure if it is already mature to be fully launched in the market. And that's of course, that they like to work with is first implementers to do testing in real environments. So yeah, no, definitely. There's still work to do in that regards."

"Yes. I would say if you're a big pharma, there are many reports and rankings and things that are broken down by R&D spend every year, and that's a key metric that Wall Street looks at. And so, if you're reducing your R&D spend, the amount of money that you're spending on developing new products, that has a huge impact on your organization. And so, they don't have the opportunity, I don't think, to really reduce that by much at all. So, on the actual spend on the actual trials themselves, on the actual discovery itself, I think that will still remain. They still have got very, very deep pockets and there are still new products emerging. It's just that they're working on more niche, more expensive products. And so, the actual R&D spend is actually going up. So, they have no choice but to continue to spend like everybody else is. On the operational side, on the IT side, I think you will see in the near term pressure there. I am hearing from a lot of my pharma past colleagues, a lot about layoffs, a lot about budget cuts, et cetera, but they're on the operational side. And so, looking to outsource people, looking to get solutions for cheaper, negotiate with people, do more multiyear deals, et cetera, or give ultimatums to a lot of the incumbents there. And the problem that Veeva has now is in most of these big pharmas, it's one of their largest line items. So, it's going to get even more scrutiny. So, again, what I predict is they won't throw them out, they'll negotiate with them, just like I said, they would on that Merck deal. So, I think what they'll try to now do is consolidate and try to get one price for everything with a discount, but then maybe what Veeva will very often do is not change pricing, but what they'll do is they'll play around with terms. They'll play around with how you pay them or they'd ask for things in exchange. Hey, do some marketing with me. Hey, do a video with me. Or hey, you will be an early adopter on this product, and you'll talk about it on stage, et cetera. So, they'll get them to win. And then what they'll do is where a lot more of the growth perhaps could be then is in the small to medium-sized space, where there's always new little biotechs coming up. And what they've seen a lot of is effects of people leaving and then going somewhere else and bringing Veeva along. So, that SMB space, enterprise was 50% revenue on Development Cloud and SMB was about the other 50%. Maybe you start to see a little bit of a shift more towards SMB there. And those are quick easy sales and easy implementations and they could just rip and run."

"Yeah. No, I don't think we were unique. I think while we were unique in the sense that we still had a paper TMS, but most that were doing electronic CMS or TMS for the trials didn't like them. I think Wingspan is IQVIAs product, Vault was Veeva's, and it was extremely easy to use. But one thing I would say they did a nice job on is we were coming out of paper and I would say most pharmas, many of them had a Documentum-based trial master file, which was very expensive, very high infrastructure, and a lot of upkeep. Even the ones that had an electronic version of the trial master file were really mimicking paper processes with Documentum and hadn't actually gotten to the behavioral aspect. Veeva did a pretty nice job of saying, "You're going from paper to an electronic system. What you shouldn't do is try to just mimic your paper processes on the tool." They really helped us look at the behavioral side of how do we not look at the trial master file as an after the fact, I go populate the file, versus as I'm doing the work, I'm actually using the trial master file as the way for protocol data and quality data to be captured. Yeah, it wasn't unique that that was one of the clinical entry points for us. I think it's very common. Now, I think it's quite possible that they could sell first RIM for the regulatory side, which was also pretty poorly served in the market, probably less so that safety, they've got an adverse event system now. The Oracle product is still king in that one, and there's so much compliance and regulatory safety signal stuff on there that I doubt that that's a place where most pharmas are going to jump first to Veeva. That'll be when they've got all the others, they'll add that one, I guess. But I think you could come in at RIM, you could come in at CTMS. Certainly the study startup, the fact that they were working with some of the consortium then for cost pharmas before study start up and investigator data being used across pharmas, one of the things all the investigators hated was every time a pharma would come and have a trial that they would work with, they had to have separate login credentials and separate information about them and their practice and their setup that drove them crazy. Veeva was giving away a lot of that at the time to basically become a bit of a default investigator platform and then a study startup platform. That's another entry point for them on the clinical side that could easily spread either direction."

"I think what Veeva is pretty good at is connecting the dots for us. Because as you might imagine, when you're talking about HCPs within a given practice, it could be straightforward. Obviously, some practices are multisite. But once you make the connections up to hospital system level, you're really looking for those unique opportunities to look at spheres of influence, which is something that Veeva does, system mapping, basically. And that probably is done in a lot of other CRMs. But I think the nuance within Veeva is, they understand how healthcare is deployed and how these spheres of influence do vary throughout a hospital health system, et cetera. That does a pretty good job allowing you to see that in a more visual fashion. If let's say, you were new to an organization and you haven't covered a portion of a region or territory before. You can sort of drop in on day one, really get a feel for what work has come before you in terms of spheres of influence and rolling things up from an HCP to a system-wide level that ostensibly you can do in another CRM. You can do that in Salesforce, right? But it's not specific to the needs of healthcare and how healthcare is basically managed architecturally. So, I think that's really where Veeva has a huge lead. They really understand the biopharma market and the medical market really well. They're a niche player, but they dominate their niche. And as a result, it's a really sticky solution. Once you deploy, where are you going to go? I think from a growth perspective, it's just a matter of Veeva adding on to that with additional value-added services that ostensibly are additional costs."

"Right. Yeah, It will be tough. Well, again, they are not known outside of pharma, so they're going to have to really market themselves big or align themselves with a partner like Accenture or Deloitte in order to push into another vertical."

"The thing is that a company who acquires Veeva system and software already did a very large investment of the software licenses and everything. So switching to another provider, it will cost a lot. It will not only cost regarding the software itself, but also the training of the staff, the learning of them to not making mistakes. Those headcount supplier to scanning and processing eTMF in general are being located in lower cost centers, and retraining them all at once and shifting all documents, it's risky. So I'm not sure if those larger CRO will change their mind from one day to another because some other software are cheaper, because the internal cost of the uploading and the naming resource for the documents needs to be trained, and it is very expensive. So it's much more a long-lasting investment than one day payment, I would say. So if Quintiles or IQVIA invest in Veeva both or another similar company, they will stick to that for at least break-even. So it will take some time to switch."

"Yeah, I think they would. When they mature, they'll grow to be a 10,000 person company or whatever, and they'll have to make a few of those changes. It'll be interesting to see whether the current management team will be the ones that make that kind of change. But yes, I think they would eventually give some of the discount, and particularly the regulatory and legal and political landscape changed for the way pharma's positioned as somewhat protected today. If that all changed radically, then everybody would have to be much more cost sensitive. But the problem you have is not that many companies that the market is, as you said, there's 25 big companies, but only it's profitable, but it's only so big, so a lot of the big software companies, even Oracle dabbles here more than anything else, and they mostly do it because they also sell life sciences, their database product and so forth. So I don't know. It would be surprising to me if it had to get into that in the next five years, I think there's plenty of other room and they're solving other unmet needs that they can continue, and they have a very high, obviously, you probably know all that, growth rate, but still continuing, haven't shown any signs of slowing down yet."

"Personally, I think, yes, because you will still need your CRM system to manage your data. You still will need- or even more if they want to replace the physical sales force by a remote based sales force or inside sales force. You still need all the channels and you need a compliance side. So I don't think would change dramatically. What would change is of course the number of users of the system as such that could go down. But that's also the reason that I notice that Veeva stores also going a bit out of the license industry, that they are going a bit also in other kinds of industries where their CRM could be used."

"Yes, absolutely. So if you can put a system out there that is ensuring compliance and not causing issues and easy to navigate, yes, then definitely, it's a yes."

"Make it easy. And when that rep goes to his next company, that next company has the same application, slightly different feel, slightly different layout, but the same look and feel. So it's about a two-week training period versus a two-month like learning curve. So it becomes really easy. When we hire, we one of the key hiring question is, how much Veeva sale experience do you have? We don't hire reps without Veeva sale experience. That's a core competency that we look for."

"Is this full expectations that field force numbers are going to reduce in their pharma customers. So the number of seats are going to reduce."

"So, the one thing that I've heard occasionally is that Veeva, the application is more than some customers need. Some customers need a very basic CRM application. And when I say basic, I'm referring to like doctor management, call management, and scheduling. And while Veeva's CRM does that very well, Veeva's CRM does that very well, so does OC's. And there are companies that aren't as advanced as the AstraZenecas, the buyers of the world that don't have like really complex sales teams and such, that they just go out there and want to make calls and get their name out there. A lot of those are smaller and mid-size. For those organizations, OC may be a better fit, because if that's all you're looking for, one, it costs a lot less than Veeva, significantly, probably 40% cheaper I think, is what I've heard. Also, the interface is a little easier from a sales rep's perspective, a little bit. I'm not going to quantify it, but it's slightly more user-friendly. So if you see something basic that has the ability to get bigger, OC is a great opportunity. It's a great choice. It's not a bad platform. It's just, they are just a little late to the market, that's all. That's the only thing I could say. A little late to the market."

"Yes. So I think in general, you have to look into three different type of businesses. So on one hand, you have primary care, so GP business, you have specialty, and you have a rare disease, which is a type of super specialty business. So very concentrated. The few customers highly knowledgeable field force organizations, but only a few. If it comes to the number of Veeva licensees, there is a prediction in the market in the ballpark of 20% to 30% less reps post-COVID. So it is, I think, significant for a company like Veeva. And this number is pretty much confirmed. So you can look into literature from McKinsey, from ZS, there are some data points which are always coming back to this range. And it's harder, unfortunately, in the areas with less value-added from field forces, so in primary care because many of the interactions between an HCP and the patients are moving, especially in your country into telehealth, so basic consultation, patient interactions, and in this, you don't need primary care reps to provide information. So I think this entire business is the first to get digitized. And on the other hand, there is also an upside on the Veeva. So whatever goes into approved e-mail into Veeva engaged into data management, next best action. You know that the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is partnered with Veeva. So speaking for marketing automation, if companies need to wrap up and ramp up these capabilities on the other side is also a business, but I'm not aware how Veeva is pricing that because the model for the rep is easy. The rep is a license and the license multiplied with a number of reps. If you buy access to marketing automation and do this, I don't know how if they can compensate or not. I have doubts."

"I think we're going to see an upset or two. I think that's why Veeva made a big deal out of the GSK and Bayer announcing their commitment to Vault CRM. So I saw these press releases, that was interesting because I guess, the rumblings I hear to is migrating from Force.com to Vault. It's not going to be easy, and that's why Veeva started two years ago working on it. But there's a lot of hemming and hawing about like is it going to be worth it, like is there going to be a disruption in business. And for a customer who's big on the Salesforce platform, it might not make any sense for them to do it. So I think we're going to see a couple of upsets in the next year or so because GSK, Bayer's migrations don't go well, everyone is going to hear about it, and they're going to run but knowing, helping to work at Veeva, I highly doubt like, I don't know, they usually get things done when they put their minds to it. I think price hike is a big problem though. So the price hikes, if they do charge customers for migration and upgrading to the CRM, Vault CRM product, you're going to see attrition, it's also because it hasn't been proven like nobody has gone live. Vault CRM. So somebody goes live, then I think we'll see a different tune or hear a different tune."

"Depends if you make it a competitive advantage or if you make it a problem for yourselves. Parexel made it a competitive advantage. We're seeing a higher strike rate for studies because of our DCT expertise. So for us, it's been a tailwind."

"That happens a lot. That happens very easily. And then every time that happens, you just see how this happens. Now, I'm burn down again. Now, I'm burned down again because I am continuing to see all these issues. So I think that's where we are, like we don't want to be part of a solution where we feel like, we just don't want to be the first person. I always use it. Sometimes they don't like it when I say, "I don't want to be the guinea pig for you guys." I like you guys, but you just -- because the challenge is in the pharma space, basically, if you're tied to safety, regulatory and other systems. You don't have a lot of time to take chances. And say, "Oh, let's try this solution." And because eventually, any vendor, any vendor, I'm not talking about Veeva. Any vendor will tell you that, "Oh, yes, we will do everything for you. We'll provide it." But if your end users are not happy or it doesn't fulfill what's needed, that's where it creates the biggest burden. Because no company wants to adopt a solution, in three months they'll say, "Oh, it's not working out, let's go back.""

"They've got to go that route because in the pharmaceutical industry now, that's being referred to as the new norm, right? So people don't want to go back to, I mean, having said that, all our clinical monitors attempted to do most of their site visits, even throughout COVID, using PBE, but they were there and out. But a lot of people are doing a lot of capture of data now from patients direct. And it's also allowed us to be more inclusive of patients. And that's always been a problem for the industry as well. If you weren't near a large city or metropolis of some sort that have a clinical site, you really had no chance in taking part in a clinical trial. And the industry is struggling to get enough patients, not because they're not out there, but because they're not out there within a 30-minute commute radius of London, for example. And the clinical sites are being run out of the big teaching hospitals in London. And so that's not particularly helpful for the industry. And because people have shown that we can do this without needing to visit hospitals now, everyone is saying, "Well, we can be more inclusive of our patients." We can also make life easier for patients who sometimes struggle for hours traveling to sites while struggling with the disease and then going through some cancer therapy at hospital and then even worst, journey home when they're perhaps feeling not their best. And we can make some of those things much easier for them. And there's always going to be the need to go in and have some treatment like that. But we can ship a lot of clinical trial medications nowadays direct to the patient. So you can be at your home anywhere in the middle of the country and receive all of the benefits of a clinical trial without having to visit a site."