Veeva Systems, off of strong earnings, holds commercial summit in Philadelphia (upddate)

Tom Paine

Follow @phillytechnews

 Subscribe in a reader

Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV) reported earnings for its 1st quarter 2017   (yes, its a bit ahead of most) on Thursday, May 26.

Though based in California, Veeva has a strong presence in the Philadelphia / New Jersey region, where so many of its Life Sciences customers are located. Much of its successful strategy originated from its Radnor office.

Revenue and earnings both exceeded estimates, and the company raised its guidance for the current quarter and full fiscal year. Revenue grew 33% to $119.8 million. Earnings fell slightly to $12.5 million from $13 million a year earlier; On a per share basis, earnings were flat at 9 cents a share.

Revenue growth was strong across both CRM, its original and largest product, and Vault, its regulatory documentation product. The thing that stood out to me was management's enthusiasm over the breadth and depth of opportunities for Veeva Vault.

It is important to understand the distinction between CRM and Vault. CRM was built on top of Salesforce's CRM,and Veeva has, at least for the length of its current contract with Salesforce, exclusive rights within the Life Sciences CRM market using the Salesforce platform, as I understand it.

Outside of CRM, however, Veeva Vault was custom built by Veeva and is completely its proprietary product. And thus Veeva can take Vault into any market it wants. And because it doesn't have to`pay a percentage of revenue to Salesforce, potentially earn higher margins as well.

So the news from last week was that Veeva is doing some exploratory selling in a couple of markets, or possibly for a couple of non-vertical applications, outside of life sciences. From the earnings call:

"This quarter we will start selling Vault outside of life sciences with a small dedicated go to market team. They will focus on regulated industries adjacent to life sciences with solutions that are based on our existing commercial content and quality applications."

There are several possibilities I can think of for Veeva, but one of them would be selling its just released quality management product  QMS  into OTC pharma manufacturing environments.

Vault is seeing strong growth across market segments (Clinical, Regulatory, Quality), and Veeva reported 18 seven-figure Vault customer relationships, up 100% year-over-year.

During the earnings conference call, CEO Peter Gassner cited Philly-based Spark Therapeutics and its effort to find a cure for blindness as an example of the exciting, vitally important things Veeva's clients were doing.

Veeva shares hit an all time high after the earnings report, and it had a market capitalization of $4.8 billion at today's close.

To give an example of Veeva's growing ecosystem, San Francisco-based Aktani today announced it had raised $17.5 million led by Safeguard Scientifics, at least partly on the strength of its partnership with Veeva.

The Veeva Commercial Summit kicked off today in Philadelphia, where Veeva has held it each year of the event's existence, and one can expect some new product announcements to be forthcoming from it. Veeva will also have a presence at DIA 2016, also in Philadelphia from June 26-30.

Veevs Product Announcements from Veeva Commercial Summit
New Veeva CRM Engage and Veeva CRM Engage Webinar Make Digital Engagement in Life Sciences Easier and More Compliant

Veeva Introduces Vault PromoMats DAM to Deliver Advanced Digital Asset Management Capabilities in Life Sciences

GSK Adds New Veeva Commercial Cloud Applications Following the Success of Veeva CRM