filings.toolsItem 1. BUSINESS
42K characters. Original on sec.gov · Markdown
Item 1. BUSINESS
Overview
Veeva is the leading provider of industry cloud solutions for the global life sciences industry. We were founded in 2007 on the premise that industry-specific cloud solutions could best address the operating challenges and regulatory requirements of life sciences companies. Our solutions are designed to meet the unique needs of our customers and their most strategic business functions—from research and development (R&D) to commercialization. Our solutions are designed to help life sciences companies develop and bring products to market faster and more efficiently, market and sell more effectively, and maintain compliance with government regulations.
Customer success is one of our core values, and our focus on it has allowed us to deepen and expand our strategic relationships with customers over time. Because of our industry focus, we have a unique, in-depth perspective into the needs and best practices of life sciences companies. This allows us to develop targeted solutions, quickly adapt to regulatory changes, and incorporate highly relevant enhancements into our existing solutions at a rapid pace.
Our goal is to become the most strategic technology partner to the life sciences industry and achieve long-term leadership with our solutions that support the R&D and commercial functions of life sciences companies. Our commercial solutions help life sciences companies achieve better, more intelligent engagement with healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations across multiple communication channels, and plan and execute more effective media and marketing campaigns. Our R&D solutions for the clinical, regulatory, quality, and safety functions help life sciences companies streamline their end-to-end product development processes to increase operational efficiency and maintain regulatory compliance throughout the product life cycle.
We are now also bringing the benefits of our content and data management solutions to a new set of customers outside of life sciences in three regulated industries: consumer goods, chemicals, and cosmetics. We believe that the ability of our solutions to meet the demanding business and compliance requirements of life sciences companies translates well into these regulated industries. Our application currently offered to companies outside of life sciences is designed to help customers efficiently manage critical regulated processes and content in a compliant way and to enable secure collaboration across internal and external stakeholders, including outsourcing partners and vendors.
Executing in the Veeva Way
Fundamental to our business model is what we call The Veeva Way. The Veeva Way is key to our disciplined approach to achieve our goal of long-term leadership in each of the product markets we serve.
We start with a focus on addressing clear and correct target markets. Those are large product markets in which the problem being addressed by our solution is strategic to the businesses of our customers and in which we believe Veeva can become the leader over the long-term if we execute well. We embrace the concept of running to complexity, an approach in which we strive to solve the most important and challenging information technology problems our customers face.
We focus on delivering product excellence and cloud innovation. Our product development process begins with assembling and investing in strong product teams focused on building deep, best-in-class applications in every product market we serve. Through innovative cloud technology, we also aim to eliminate disparate systems by delivering unified application suites that work together on a common platform.
We strive to forge strong relationships with our customers and focus on customer success. When we enter a new product market, we begin with a small number of early adopter customers. We focus on learning from these early adopters and ensuring that they are successful with our products. Once successful, our early adopters have developed into vocal advocates, enabling our reference selling model.
Finally, our goal is to drive strong growth and profitability through highly efficient, targeted sales and marketing, disciplined product planning, and profitable professional services. Our strong growth and profitability have allowed us to make ongoing investments for continued product innovation in our existing markets and provides us with the resources to invest in new market opportunities.
Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K 1
Our Industry Cloud Solutions for Life Sciences
Our industry cloud solutions for the life sciences industry are grouped into three key product areas—Veeva Commercial Cloud, Veeva Data Cloud, and Veeva Vault—and are designed to address pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies’ most pressing strategic needs in their commercial and R&D operations.
Veeva Commercial Cloud
Veeva Commercial Cloud is a suite of multichannel customer relationship management (CRM) applications, a commercial data warehouse, territory allocation and alignment applications, a master data management application, and customer reference and key opinion leader data and services, designed to help companies drive smarter, more proactive engagement with healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations and ensure compliance.
Our multichannel CRM applications that are part of Veeva Commercial Cloud include:
| • | Veeva CRM and Veeva Medical CRM enable customer-facing employees, such as life sciences sales representatives, key account managers, and scientific liaisons, to manage, track, and optimize interactions with healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations utilizing a single, integrated solution. With multichannel Veeva CRM, customers have an end-to-end solution for the planning and coordination of their teams across all key channels, including face-to-face, email, and web. Veeva CRM supports the life sciences industry’s unique commercial business processes and regulatory compliance requirements with highly specialized functionality, such as prescription drug sample management with electronic signature capture, the management of complex affiliations between physicians and the organizations where they work, and the capture of medical inquiries from physicians. Key existing and recently announced innovative capabilities of our Veeva CRM and Veeva Medical CRM solutions include: |
| ◦ | Powered by data science, Veeva CRM Suggestions is a dashboard included within Veeva CRM that offers life sciences sales representatives recommendations on the next best action and right channel for the next interaction with their customers. |
| ◦ | Veeva CRM’s Real-time Architecture and Autosync capability ensures all CRM information, including activity, customer, and product data are available across multiple mobile devices. |
| ◦ | Veeva CRM Approved Notes allows sales representatives to capture free text notes in Veeva CRM and leverage the power of artificial intelligence to save information in a compliant way. Veeva Approved Notes is planned for availability in 2020. |
| ◦ | Customer Journeys is a new capability in Veeva CRM to better target and manage customers through stages of an adoption lifecycle and drive the best actions at the right customer stage. |
| • | Veeva CRM MyInsights provides a data visualization tool that delivers tailored, actionable insights to life sciences sales representatives in Veeva CRM. |
| • | Veeva CLM provides capabilities for life sciences sales representatives to present digital marketing content on a mobile device, such as an iPad, during in-person interactions with healthcare professionals. |
| • | Veeva CRM Approved Email enables the management, delivery, and tracking of emails from life sciences sales representatives to healthcare professionals, while maintaining regulatory compliance. |
| • | Veeva CRM Events Management enables the planning, management, and execution of group meetings with healthcare professionals and helps life sciences companies track and manage spending in order to meet transparency reporting requirements. Physicians World, which we recently acquired, provides complementary full-service speakers bureau logistics in the United States for life sciences companies of all sizes. |
| • | Veeva CRM Engage delivers the ability to interact with healthcare professionals for online meetings—using Veeva CRM Engage Meeting—and provides closed-loop marketing capabilities for self-directed interactions with healthcare professionals via the web with Veeva CRM Engage for Portals. Veeva CRM Engage Webinar allows companies to execute virtual events in a compliant way and is also built to work with Veeva CRM Events Management. |
| • | Veeva Align enables life sciences companies to perform fast, accurate sales territory alignments. Through native integration with Veeva CRM, Veeva Align allows seamless field collaboration to increase accuracy and minimize hand-offs. |
2 Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K
| • | Veeva CRM Approved Messaging adds support for messaging applications, such as WeChat and WhatsApp, to open new digital channels for sales representatives to engage in relevant, timely interactions with healthcare professionals. Veeva Approved Messaging is available today for WeChat and is planned for availability for WhatsApp in 2020. |
Our data solutions that are part of Veeva Commercial Cloud include:
| • | Veeva OpenData provides healthcare professional and healthcare organization data that includes demographic information, license information and status, specialty information, affiliations, and other key data that is crucial to customer engagement and compliance. In the life sciences industry, this category of data is referred to as customer reference data or customer data. Veeva OpenData Explorer, planned for availability in 2020, will give users the option to access comprehensive customer reference data through a web-based portal. We also offer outsourced data stewardship services to our customers. |
| • | Veeva Oncology Link is a single source of continuously updated profile and market intelligence data on key scientific leaders in oncology. Veeva Oncology Link associates thousands of global experts with millions of activities, including publications, clinical trials, and events. |
| • | Crossix, which we acquired in November 2019, provides pharmaceutical brands privacy-safe U.S. patient data and a best-in-class analytics platform to maximize media investments and drive greater marketing effectiveness. Crossix SafeMine technology connects health data and non-health data, including consumer and media data, for U.S. patients in a privacy-safe manner. Crossix DIFA uses that data to enable real-time measurement and optimization of complex, cross-channel media campaigns aimed at patients and healthcare professionals. |
Our master data management solution that is part of Veeva Commercial Cloud includes:
| • | Veeva Network Customer Master is an industry-specific, customer master software solution that de-duplicates, standardizes, and cleanses healthcare professional and healthcare organization data from multiple systems and data sources to arrive at a single, consolidated customer master record. Veeva Network Customer Master comes pre-configured with a data model that is specific to life sciences and supports global harmonization, as well as country, market, and regional data specifications, within a single system. |
Our next-generation commercial data warehouse and advanced artificial intelligence application that are part of Veeva Commercial Cloud include:
| • | Veeva Nitro eliminates the time and effort of custom data warehouse development and maintenance and provides a foundation for artificial intelligence and advanced analytics. With an industry-specific data model and standard data connectors, Nitro enables life sciences companies to more easily unify their most important data sources, such as prescription, sales, formulary, and claims data. |
| • | Veeva Andi is an artificial intelligence application that embeds tailored insights and suggestions in Veeva CRM regarding the next best action for improved field efficiency and effectiveness. With Veeva Andi, customers can adopt, deploy, and scale artificial intelligence across Veeva CRM and deliver the right message in the right channel at the right time for an improved customer experience. |
Veeva Data Cloud
Veeva Data Cloud will provide longitudinal U.S. patient and prescriber data for both retail and specialty distribution channels for commercial use cases such as launch planning, patient segmentation, commercial analytics, artificial intelligence, territory design, targeting, and incentive compensation. Veeva Data Cloud will be powered by existing Crossix technology, privacy-safe processes, and an expanding health data set and will have the same open and customer-friendly usage agreements that exist today with other Veeva data solutions. We expect Veeva Data Cloud to be available by December 2020.
Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K 3
Veeva Vault
Veeva Vault is a unified suite of cloud-based, enterprise content and data management applications, all built on our proprietary Veeva Vault Platform. Our Veeva Vault applications address the content management requirements for our customers’ commercial functions, including medical and sales and marketing, and key R&D functions, including clinical, regulatory, quality, and safety.
Veeva Vault’s unique ability to handle content and data allows us to build content- and data-centric applications to help customers streamline end-to-end business processes and eliminate manual processes and siloed systems. Veeva Vault can be deployed one application at a time or as an integrated solution with multiple applications that enables our customers to unify and manage important documents and related data in a single, global system.
Our Veeva Vault applications for life sciences are organized into two product areas: Veeva Vault for Commercial Content Management and Veeva Development Cloud.
Veeva Vault for Commercial Content Management
The increasing use and variety of content in the sales and marketing efforts of life sciences companies requires rapid creation of materials and better management of commercial content, with continuous strict regulatory compliance across channels and geographies. The Veeva Vault applications and capabilities primarily used by the commercial and medical departments of life sciences companies to manage commercial and medical content include:
| • | Veeva Vault PromoMats combines digital asset management with content review and distribution capabilities through which life sciences companies can manage the end-to-end process for creation, review, approval, claims tracking, multichannel distribution, expiration, and withdrawal of commercial content across the digital supply chain. Veeva Vault Auto Claims Linking is a capability in Veeva Vault PromoMats that uses AI to suggest links from claims to related references, reducing the administrative burden and risk of managing claims across countries, channels, and assets. |
| • | Veeva Vault MedComms enables life sciences companies to streamline the creation, approval, and delivery of medical content and create and maintain a single, validated source of medical content across multiple channels and geographies. Integrated medical inquiry management allows medical affairs teams to centralize medical inquiries and content to deliver verbal and written communications to healthcare professionals and patients, including approved answers to questions received through a call center or company website. |
Veeva Development Cloud
Veeva Development Cloud brings together application suites for the clinical, regulatory, quality, and safety functions of life sciences companies on the Veeva Vault Platform to enable companies to streamline product development life cycles and eliminate manual processes and siloed systems. These applications help life sciences companies achieve greater efficiency and agility in product development, while maintaining regulatory compliance. Our Veeva Development Cloud applications each have a unique data model based on shared content and data, deep functionality, and pre-defined workflows to support industry-specific processes.
The Veeva Development Cloud application suites are:
Veeva Vault Clinical
Veeva Vault Clinical is the industry’s first cloud application suite that combines electronic data capture (EDC), clinical trial management (CTMS), electronic trial master file (eTMF), and study start-up applications to unify clinical data management and clinical operations. Veeva also offers a solution to help clinical research sites seamlessly manage regulatory documents and trial information.
| • | Veeva Vault CDMS is a clinical data management solution that includes Veeva Vault EDC, Veeva Vault Coder, and Veeva Vault Data Workbench. Vault CDMS combines coding, EDC, data cleaning, and reporting in a single integrated solution to manage studies and gain a complete view of all clinical data within a trial. Vault EDC and Vault Coder are available today. Vault Data Workbench is planned for availability in 2020. |
4 Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K
| • | Veeva Vault CTMS is a clinical trial management application that helps unify information and documentation for a “single source of truth” across sponsors, contract research organizations, and investigators to reduce complexity, increase transparency, and speed time to market. |
| • | Veeva Vault Payments is a complementary application for Vault CTMS that helps manage the payment and reimbursement process to clinical research sites. |
| • | Veeva Vault eTMF is an electronic trial master file application that manages the repository of documents for active and archived clinical trials for improved inspection readiness, visibility, and control. |
| • | Veeva Vault Study Startup helps life sciences companies to more efficiently manage the process of activating investigator sites for clinical trials. |
| • | Veeva SiteVault helps clinical research sites reduce the administrative burden of managing documents and processes for study site qualification and activation with capabilities such as electronic signatures, remote monitoring, certified copy workflows, and reporting. Veeva offers a fully configurable edition called SiteVault Enterprise that includes open APIs for integrations, customized reports, and tailored workflows. Veeva also offers a free edition called SiteVault Free to provide clinical trial sites of all sizes with a modern cloud solution that helps streamline trial activities with the goal of accelerating clinical research for the life sciences industry overall. |
Veeva Vault RIM
Veeva Vault RIM is a suite of applications that provides fully integrated regulatory information management (RIM) capabilities on a single cloud platform.
| • | Veeva Vault Submissions brings together submission content planning and authoring in a single application to help life sciences companies gather and organize documents and content, according to industry-accepted guidelines, that should be included in a regulatory submission to a healthcare authority, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). |
| • | Veeva Vault Submissions Archive stores published submissions and correspondence in a secure, globally accessible repository. |
| • | Veeva Vault Registrations enables life sciences companies to manage, track, and report product and registration information worldwide, including registration status, variations, health authority questions and commitments, and certification requests. |
| • | Veeva Vault Submissions Publishing provides an integrated solution for dossier publishing that helps speed the preparation and processing time of regulatory submissions. |
Veeva Vault Quality
Veeva Vault Quality is the industry’s first unified suite of quality applications for life sciences, contract manufacturers, and suppliers to seamlessly manage quality processes and content in a single platform for greater visibility and control.
| • | Veeva Vault QualityDocs enables the creation, review, approval, distribution, and management of controlled documents, such as standard operating procedures, manufacturing recipes, and specifications. |
| • | Veeva Vault Station Manager provides manufacturing operators up-to-date documents and video, including critical work instructions and procedures, directly through tablets located at manufacturing stations on the manufacturing floor. |
| • | Veeva Vault QMS is a quality management solution that provides best practice processes for deviations, internal and external audits, complaints, lab investigations, change controls, corrective and preventative actions, and proactive management initiatives. Quality Risk Management in Vault QMS allows companies to take a proactive approach to monitoring risks and implementing mitigation plans throughout the entire product lifecycle for enhanced product quality and patient safety. |
| • | Veeva Vault Training simplifies role-based training within life sciences companies and helps quality teams remain audit-ready and compliant. Companies can efficiently organize, assign, and track content and information so the right people are trained on the right policies and procedures. |
Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K 5
Veeva Vault Safety
Veeva Vault Safety is a unified suite of applications that will help the pharmacovigilance and safety departments of life sciences companies increase efficiency and maintain compliance in the management of end-to-end safety processes that includes:
| • | Veeva Vault Safety is a modern application for the collection, management, and real-time oversight of adverse events in a single system. |
| • | Veeva Vault SafetyDocs centrally manages pharmacovigilance content for greater operational efficiency and compliance. It enables collaboration within teams and across clinical, quality, regulatory, and other organizations within life sciences companies. |
| • | Veeva Vault Safety.AI is an artificial intelligence application that automates case intake to reduce the time and effort of manual data entry for more efficient case processing. Safety.AI is planned for availability in 2020. |
Veeva Vault Medical Device Suite
Veeva Vault Medical Device Suite includes the commercial, clinical, quality, and regulatory applications described above to provide manufacturers with greater visibility, collaboration, and speed across the product development life cycle.
Solutions for Regulated Industries Outside of Life Sciences
Our initial applications for customers outside of life sciences address specific content and data management processes within the regulated industries of consumer goods, chemicals, and cosmetics. Veeva QualityOne is a robust quality management, document management, and training solution. Veeva RegulatoryOne helps companies manage regulatory submission content. Veeva Claims addresses the end-to-end product and marketing claims management process.
Professional Services and Support
We also offer professional services to help customers maximize the value of our solutions. Our service teams possess industry expertise, project management capabilities, and deep technical acumen that we believe our customers highly value. Our professional services teams work with our systems integrator partners to deliver projects. We offer the following professional services:
| • | implementation and deployment planning and project management; |
| • | requirements analysis, solution design and configuration; |
| • | systems environment management and deployment services; |
| • | services focused on advancing or transforming business and operating processes related to Veeva solutions; |
| • | technical consulting services related to data migration and systems integrations; |
| • | training on our solutions; and |
| • | ongoing managed services, such as outsourced systems administration. |
We organize our professional services teams by specific expertise so that they can provide advice and support for best industry practices in the research and development and commercial departments of our customers.
Our global systems integrator partners also deliver implementation and selected support services to customers who wish to utilize them. Our systems integrator partners include Accenture, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Deloitte Consulting, and other life sciences specialty firms.
6 Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K
Our Customers
As of January 31, 2020, we served 861 customers. For an explanation of how we define current customers, see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Components of Results of Operations.” We deliver solutions to companies throughout the life sciences industry, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies, contract sales organizations, and contract research organizations. Our life sciences customers range from the largest global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies such as Bayer AG, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Eli Lilly and Company, Gilead Sciences, Inc., Merck & Co., Inc., and Novartis International AG, to smaller pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including Alkermes plc, Grupo Ferrer Internacional S.A., Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and LEO Pharma A/S. We also deliver solutions to companies in the following regulated industries outside of life sciences: consumer goods, chemicals, and cosmetics. For our fiscal years ended January 31, 2018, 2019, and 2020, we did not have any single customer that represented more than 10% of our total revenues.
Our Employees
As of January 31, 2020, we employed 3,501 people worldwide. We also engage temporary employees and consultants. Our employees in the United States are not represented by a labor union, however, in certain foreign locations, there are workers’ councils that represent our employees. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be very good.
Research and Development
Our R&D organization is responsible for the design, development, and testing of our solutions and applications. Based on customer feedback and needs, we focus our efforts on developing new solutions functionality, applications, and core technologies and further enhancing the usability, functionality, reliability, performance, and flexibility of existing solutions and applications.
Sales and Marketing
We sell our solutions through our direct sales organization. In large life sciences companies, the R&D and commercial business functions commonly have separate technology and business decision makers. Accordingly, we market and sell our solutions to align with the distinct characteristics of those decision makers. We have distinct R&D and commercial sales teams, which we further segment to focus on selling to large global life sciences companies and smaller life sciences companies. We also have a distinct sales team for our sales efforts to companies in regulated industries outside of life sciences.
Technology Infrastructure and Operations
Our solutions utilize a pod-based architecture that allows for scalability, operational simplicity, and security. Our products are hosted in data centers located in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea. We utilize third parties to provide our computing infrastructure and manage the infrastructure on which our solutions operate. For example, for Veeva CRM and certain of our multichannel CRM applications, we utilize the hosting infrastructure provided by salesforce.com. For our Veeva Vault applications, Veeva Network applications, and certain other Veeva Commercial Cloud applications, we utilize Amazon Web Services.
Our infrastructure providers employ advanced measures to ensure physical integrity and security, including redundant power and cooling systems, fire and flood prevention mechanisms, continual security coverage, biometric readers at entry points and anonymous exteriors. We also implement various disaster recovery measures such that data loss would be minimized in the event of a single data center disaster. We architect our solutions using redundant configurations to minimize service interruptions. We continually monitor our solutions for any sign of failure or pending failure, and we take preemptive action to attempt to minimize or prevent downtime.
Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K 7
Our technology is based on multitenant architectures that apply common, consistent management practices for all customers using our solutions. We enable multiple customers to share the same version of our solutions while securely partitioning their respective data. Portions of our multichannel customer relationship management applications are built on the Salesforce1 Platform of salesforce.com inc. Our Veeva Vault applications, Veeva Network, and portions of our other Commercial Cloud applications are built upon our own proprietary platforms. Certain of our other applications rely on technology platforms provided by Amazon Web Services. For example, Veeva Nitro, our commercial data warehouse application, utilizes Amazon Redshift.
Quality and Compliance Program
Veeva maintains a quality management system certified to ISO9001 to ensure process controls conform to established industry standards across our product offerings. To comply with IT healthcare regulations, certain capabilities such as robust audit trail tracking, compliant electronic signature capture, data encryption, and secure access controls must be designed for and embedded in our solutions. In addition to design requirements, our solutions must be thoroughly tested to comply with the regulations that apply to electronic record keeping systems for the life sciences industry, which include:
| Regulation | Regulation Description |
| 21 CFR 820.75 | U.S. FDA device regulation on system validation |
| 21 CFR 211.68 | U.S. FDA pharma GMP regulation on system validation |
| 21 CFR 11 | U.S. FDA requirement for maintenance of electronic records |
| EU Annex 11 | EU GMP requirement for maintenance of electronic records |
| 21 CFR 203 | Drug sample tracking as required by the Prescription Drug Marketing Act |
| PFSB Notification, No. 0401022 (Japan) | Use of Electromagnetic Records and Electronic Signatures for Approval of, or License for, Drugs |
Each version of our solutions that are subject to regulations that require companies to maintain certain records and submit information to regulators as part of compliance verification undergoes validation testing against these and other relevant standards.
Security Program
Veeva maintains an information security management system certified to ISO 27001 and managed by our Chief Information Security Officer to ensure security controls conform to established standards across both product and infrastructure components. Our solution undergoes internal vulnerability testing prior to release, and we employ a third party to perform penetration and vulnerability tests on our solutions on at least an annual basis. We also obtain independent third-party audit opinions related to security and availability annually, such as SOC 2, Type II reports and ISO 27001 attestation reports. We also require role-based security and security awareness training and have defined security incident response processes.
Privacy Program
Veeva maintains a global privacy program aligned to applicable laws and regulations, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”),and Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (“LGPD”), which will be effective on August 15, 2020. We have a Chief Privacy Officer, who collaborates with our Chief Information Security Officer and business and product leaders throughout our organization. Veeva maintains an active EU-U.S. Privacy Shield certification and a Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield certification in order to allow the transfer of EU and Swiss personal data to the United States. Veeva is also registered as a data broker as required by the California Attorney General. In addition, Veeva maintains privacy policies and procedures and requires role-based privacy awareness training. For more information about our privacy practices, please visit veeva.com/privacy.
Competition
The markets for our solutions are global, rapidly evolving, highly competitive, and subject to changing regulations, advancing technology, and shifting customer needs. In new sales cycles, we generally compete with other cloud-based solutions from providers that make applications geared toward the life sciences industry. The principal such competitor for our Veeva Commercial Cloud applications is IQVIA Inc., which offers a CRM application built on the Salesforce1 Platform, various data products, and other applications. No single vendor offers products that compete with all of our Veeva Vault applications, but IQVIA, Medidata Solutions, Inc. (recently acquired by Dassault Systèmes), OpenText
8 Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K
Corporation, Oracle Corporation, and other smaller application providers offer applications that compete with certain of our Veeva Vault applications.
Our Commercial Cloud and Veeva Vault application suites also compete to replace client server-based legacy solutions offered by companies such as Oracle, Microsoft Corporation, and other smaller application providers. Our customers may also choose to use cloud-based applications or platforms that are not life sciences specific—such as Box.com, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft—for certain of the functions our applications provide.
Our data and data analytics products, including our planned and recently announced Data Cloud offering, compete with IQVIA and other smaller data providers.
We sell certain of our Veeva Vault applications to companies outside the life sciences industry. In this segment of our business, we compete with solutions such as those offered by OpenText, Microsoft, Sparta Systems Inc., EtQ Management Consultants, LLC, Oracle, and Box and custom-built software developed by third-party vendors or in-house by our potential customers.
Our professional services offerings compete with a range of professional services firms.
Some of our actual and potential competitors have advantages over us, such as longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing or other resources, stronger brand and business recognition, larger intellectual property portfolios, and agreements with a broader set of system integrators and other partners. We expect competition to intensify in the future, and we may face competition from new market entrants as well.
We believe the principal competitive factors in our market include the following:
| • | level of customer satisfaction; |
| • | regulatory compliance verification and functionality; |
| • | domain expertise with respect to life sciences; |
| • | ease of deployment and use of solutions and applications; |
| • | breadth and depth of solution and application functionality; |
| • | brand awareness and reputation; |
| • | modern and adaptive technology platform; |
| • | capability for customization, configurability, integration, security, scalability and reliability of applications; |
| • | total cost of ownership; |
| • | ability to innovate and respond to customer needs rapidly; |
| • | size of customer base and level of user adoption; |
| • | ability to secure the rights to load and process third party proprietary data licensed by customers; and |
| • | ability to integrate with legacy enterprise infrastructures and third-party applications. |
We believe that we generally compete favorably on the basis of these factors.
Intellectual Property
We rely on a combination of patents, trade secrets, copyrights and trademarks, as well as contractual protections, to establish and protect our intellectual property rights. We have developed a process for seeking patent protection for our technology innovations. The table below provides a summary of our issued patents and pending patent applications as of January 31, 2020:
| Issued U.S. patents (expiring between May 2027 and January 2038) | 25 |
| Issued international patents (expiring between April 2025 and June 2037) | 11 |
| U.S. and international pending applications | 49 |
Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K 9
Our patents and patent applications cover technology within the following of our product categories: Veeva Commercial Cloud, Veeva Vault Platform, Veeva Vault Clinical, Veeva Vault RIM, Veeva Vault CDMS, and Veeva Vault Safety. We plan to continue expanding our patent portfolio. We require our employees, consultants and other third parties to enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements and control access to software, documentation and other proprietary information. Although we rely on our intellectual property rights, as well as contractual protections to establish and protect our proprietary rights, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel, creation of new features and functionality and frequent enhancements to our applications are essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position as provider of software solutions and applications to the life sciences industry.
Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary technology and our intellectual property rights, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy or obtain and use our technology to develop applications with the same functionality as our application. Policing unauthorized use of our technology and intellectual property rights is difficult, and protection of our rights through civil enforcement mechanisms may be expensive and time consuming.
Companies in our industry as well as non-practicing entities often own a number of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets and frequently enter into litigation based on allegations of infringement, misappropriation or other violations of intellectual property or other rights. We are currently engaged in legal proceedings with competitors in which the competitors are asserting trade secret misappropriation and other claims, and we may face new allegations in the future that we have infringed the patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets and other intellectual property rights of other competitors or non-practicing entities. We expect that we and others in our industry will continue to be subject to third-party infringement claims by competitors as the functionality of applications in different industry segments overlaps, and by non-practicing entities. Any of these third parties might make a claim of infringement against us at any time. For example, see the description of our current litigations in note 15 of the notes to our consolidated financial statements.
Corporate Information
Our website address is http://www.veeva.com. Information contained on our website is not incorporated by reference into this Form 10-K, and you should not consider information contained on our website to be part of this Form 10-K or in deciding whether to purchase shares of our Class A common stock. Our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available free of charge on the Investors portion of our website at http://ir.veeva.com as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.
10 Veeva Systems Inc. | Form 10-K
Previous: Cover and table of contents · Next: Item 1A. RISK FACTORS