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Item 1. BUSINESS.

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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 span cloud software, data, and business consulting and 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 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 and clinical research sites. 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. Our solutions for clinical research sites enable regulatory documents and trial information to be managed in a modern cloud solution that is intended to accelerate the clinical research process for the life sciences industry overall.

We also bring the benefits of our content and data management solutions to 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 applications currently offered to companies outside of life sciences are 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.

On February 1, 2021, after approval by our stockholders, we became a Delaware public benefit corporation (PBC). A PBC is a for-profit company operating under subchapter XV of the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware (i) that has adopted a public benefit purpose intended to provide benefits beyond just stockholder financial returns, and (ii) whose directors have a fiduciary duty to balance the financial interests of stockholders, the best interests of other stakeholders materially affected by the company's conduct (which we believe includes customers, employees, partners, and the communities in which we operate), and the pursuit of the company's public benefit purpose. Our public benefit purpose, as reflected in our certificate of incorporation, is “to provide products and services that are intended to help make the industries we serve more productive, and to create high-quality employment opportunities in the communities in which we operate.” We believe that operating as a PBC reflects our core values—do the right thing, customer success, employee success, and speed—and helps us maintain alignment with the principal industry we serve, life sciences, and its broad goal to improve health and extend lives.

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 also believe that addressing such problems has the potential for broader societal benefits, for instance, by making the therapeutic development process more efficient.

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We focus on delivering product excellence and innovation. Our product development process begins with assembling and investing in strong product teams focused on building deep, best-in-class software and data solutions for every product market we serve. Through innovative cloud technology, we also aim to eliminate legacy systems, manual processes, and application silos by delivering unified suites of applications and data that support end-to-end business processes.

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.

Our Industry Cloud Solutions for Life Sciences

Our industry cloud solutions for the life sciences industry are grouped into two key product areas—Veeva Commercial 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 software, data and analytics solutions built specifically for life sciences companies to more efficiently and effectively commercialize their products.

Veeva Commercial Cloud software applications 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 virtual engagement. Veeva CRM supports the life science 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.

  • Veeva CRM MyInsights** provides a data visualization tool that delivers tailored, actionable insights to life sciences sales representatives embedded directly in Veeva CRM.

  • 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 Engage** enables life sciences representatives to interact with healthcare professionals in online meetings. Engage is embedded in Veeva CRM for ease of use, regulatory compliance, and access to important industry-specific processes such as signature requests for samples or medical inquiries.

  • Veeva Align** enables life sciences companies to perform fast, accurate territory alignments. Through native integration with Veeva CRM, Veeva Align allows seamless field collaboration to increase accuracy and minimize manual effort.

  • 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 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. We also provide event support services in the United States for life sciences companies of all sizes through our Veeva Digital Events offerings, which consists, in part, of the acquired Physicians World business.

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  • MyVeeva for Doctors** is a digital platform to connect healthcare professionals with the life sciences industry. The MyVeeva for Doctors mobile application for healthcare professionals enables them to find the right people and resources from across the industry to better serve their patients.

Veeva Commercial Cloud data and analytics solutions 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 gives users the ability to access comprehensive customer reference data through a web-based portal. We also offer outsourced data stewardship services to our customers.

  • Veeva Link** provides real-time customer intelligence data on key scientific experts in oncology and is expected to expand to experts in additional therapeutic areas in 2021. Veeva Link associates thousands of global experts with millions of actions, including publications, clinical trials, events, and digital activities.

  • Veeva Crossix 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. Patented 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.

  • Veeva Data Cloud provides longitudinal U.S. patient data for both retail and specialty distribution channels for commercial use cases such as launch planning, patient segmentation, commercial analytics, artificial intelligence, territory design, and targeting. Veeva Data Cloud is powered by the Crossix Data Platform, privacy-safe processes, and an expanding health data set.

  • 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.

  • Veeva Nitro** is a data science and analytics platform that connects commercial data sources for actionable insights and agile decision making. 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 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 sales and marketing and medical content and communications, 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.

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Veeva Vault for Commercial Content Management

The high volume of digital interactions has increased pressure on the sales and marketing organizations of life sciences companies to deliver relevant, compliant content to healthcare professionals faster while maintaining 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** is an end-to-end content and digital asset management (DAM) solution through which life sciences companies can collaborate, review, distribute, and update commercial content and manage assets. Workflows within Vault PromoMats enable real-time collaboration, review, and approval of commercial content in a compliant way. Built-in DAM capabilities provide a globally-accessible repository for rich media content.

  • 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 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 CDB. 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.

  • 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 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 Payments is a complementary application for Vault CTMS that helps manage the payment and reimbursement process to clinical research sites.

  • Veeva Vault Study Startup** helps life sciences companies more efficiently manage the process of activating investigator sites for clinical trials.

  • Veeva Clinical Network** links patients, clinical research sites, and life sciences companies that sponsor clinical trials to help create paperless, patient-centric 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

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for integrations, customized reports, and tailored workflows. We also offer 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. Life sciences companies that sponsor clinical trials and the contract research organizations with which they work to run clinical trials on an outsourced basis use Veeva Site Connect to share and automate the flow of clinical trial information between Veeva Vault Clinical applications and Veeva SiteVault allowing for better collaboration and faster clinical trials. MyVeeva for Patients provides patient access to trials with current capabilities for eConsent with additional capabilities planned for the future.

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, 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.

  • 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 Vault Safety

Veeva Vault Safety is a unified suite of applications that helps 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.

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  • Veeva Vault Signal** unifies signal management processes from identification through risk evaluation and mitigation so pharmacovigilance teams can easily manage safety signals with greater visibility across the entire signal workflow.

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.

Our Cloud 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.

Veeva Business Consulting

We offer Veeva Business Consulting services through dedicated teams that are distinct from our processional services and support organization. Our Business Consulting team provides strategic consulting services and solutions that are often enabled by our unique industry-wide perspective and proprietary data. Business Consulting engagements typically focus on a particular customer success initiative, strategic analysis, or business process change, and not a cloud software implementation. Our Business Consulting engagements are currently focused on customer-centric commercial strategies that solve commercial business challenges such as optimizing digital engagement, commercial content management, field optimization, go-to-market strategy, and commercial insights and analytics. We plan to expand Business Consulting into the R&D functions of life sciences companies by the end of 2021 to help our customers accelerate their capabilities and improve business processes.

Professional Services and Support

We 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.

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Our Customers

As of January 31, 2021, we served 993 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 emerging growth pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including Alkermes plc, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc., bluebird bio, Inc., Idorsia Pharmaceuticals Ltd, and Moderna Inc. We also deliver solutions to companies in the following regulated industries outside of life sciences: consumer goods, chemicals, and cosmetics.

Our Human Capital Resources

As of January 31, 2021, we had a world-wide employee population of 4,506 employees, up by 1,005 from the previous year. Our employees in the United States are not represented by a labor union; however, in certain foreign locations, local workers’ councils represent our employees. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be very good.

Our workforce is diverse in many respects. As of January 31, 2021, 42% of our global employee population self-identified as female, and as of December 31, 2020, approximately 38% of our U.S. workforce self-identified as members of underrepresented racial or ethnic groups.

We use a combination of base salary and equity to compensate our employees. We also offer a range of benefits to our employees, including comprehensive healthcare and other wellness programs. We believe our compensation and benefits programs are competitive.

While we experience intense competition for talent, we believe we have been effective in attracting and retaining talented employees. Our rate of voluntary attrition has been comparatively low historically.

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. Our products used only in China are hosted in data centers located in China. 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

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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.

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 Salesforce 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 regulated 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:

RegulationRegulation Description
21 CFR 820.75U.S. FDA device regulation on system validation
21 CFR 211.68U.S. FDA pharma GMP regulation on system validation
21 CFR 11U.S. FDA requirement for maintenance of electronic records
EU Annex 11EU Good Manufacturing Processes (GMP) requirement for maintenance of electronic records
21 CFR 203Drug 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
OECD No. 17Application of Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) Principles to Computerised Systems
ICH E6(R2) Section 5.5Good Clinical Practice (GCP) Validation Principles

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 third parties 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 2 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 such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). 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; however, we currently rely on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses as our alternative legal data transfer mechanism. Veeva is also registered as a data broker as required by the California Attorney General. In addition, Veeva maintains privacy policies and procedures and 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-

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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 Salesforce Platform and other applications. Our data and data analytics products, including Veeva OpenData, Veeva Link, Veeva Crossix, and Veeva Data Cloud, compete with IQVIA and smaller data and data analytics providers. No single vendor offers products that compete with all of our Veeva Vault applications, but IQVIA, Dassault Systèmes, OpenText 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, Inc., Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft—for certain of the functions our applications provide.

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. (recently acquired by Honeywell International 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 business consulting and 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

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our technology innovations. The table below provides a summary of our issued patents and pending patent applications as of January 31, 2021:

Issued U.S. patents (expiring between May 2027 and January 2039)33
Issued international patents (expiring between April 2025 and June 2037)11
U.S. and international pending patent applications58

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 we 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 a provider of technology solutions 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.

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