Ironically,
Veeva's founder and CEO Peter Gassner was a senior executive at
Salesforce, where he found that the company's product was ill-suited for
use in the pharmaceutical industry. That planted the seed for what
would become a cloud platform specifically geared toward the world's
drugmakers.
The
company's services are led by its Veeva Commercial Cloud, which is the
legacy cloud-based CRM platform designed for sales and marketing that
drug companies use to maintain contacts, track sales transactions, and
confer with physicians for feedback. This system accounted for 68% of
Veeva's $544 million in revenue for 2016.
The
massive opportunity going forward, however, is the Veeva Vault. The
platform addresses clinical trial management and serves as a gathering
place for the data necessary to submit drugs for regulatory review. It
also provides access to this data directly to the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, the agency tasked with drug approval.
The
platform was so successful that the company created a version for other
industries with high regulatory hurdles, expanding its offering to
chemical, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods companies. Revenue
from Vault has grown at a compound rate of 123% over the past two years.
The combination of high switching costs and industry-specific solutions should provide Veeva with significant growth for years to come.
