Veeva Systems Inc. (NYSE:VEEV) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Tyler Radke: Got it. And yes, sorry, I didn’t mean migration, though have been impressive if you migrated those customers. And in weeks, I meant more the signing. So good — good to hear the excitement from other customers. Just as a follow-up, Brent, I know your favorite topic here on billings. But I guess 2 quick clarifications. Number one, as we think about the updated normalized billings guide for this year, and if you walk through some of the puts and takes that’s driving it down. I guess the changes to billings terms and invoicing duration, wouldn’t that be normalized, if you will, in the normalized billings? Or is the normalization just for TSC? And then I know you’re not guiding the billings for FY ’25, but just as we think about the historical relationship between revenue and billings and what does seem to be maybe some modest duration headwinds, anything to keep in mind there?

Brent Bowman: Sure. On your first part of your question, so what we normalize is we normalize this for changes in our renewal base. So if you have an existing customer renewal base, they change frequency or they change duration, we normalize that out. So we take the noise out. What we do for new business is we do our best effort to model what we expect the profile of that new business to come in. And so what you’re hearing you say is the expectation we have for new business, there was — the actual fact pattern was a bit different. So we have more quarterly billers in that new business than we anticipated. We thought we’d have a bit more annual. So it’s new business, not normalized. It’s the renewal portion that we do normalize. And then your second question is we contemplated in the billings that we are exiting fiscal year ’24 in our reiterated fiscal year ’25 total revenue number. So $2.75 billion, and we feel good about our ability to execute against that.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs.

Carolyn Valenti: This is Carolyn Valenti on for Gabriela. Just one for me and going to be again on the billings dynamic. But just related to the deals that you talked about being pushed from the back half of this year into early next year. There was clearly a change versus your initial expectations. And I know you said there’s nothing incremental in the past 90 days on macro, but can you help us reconcile those 2 comments a little bit?

Brent Bowman: Yes. I mean you’re going to have — it’s going to be customer by customer, right? There is no exact pattern, that you can say across the larger cohorts. And in the first half of the year, I recall, the actual — we had favorable linearity. So from period to period, it’s going to ebb and flow depending on the specific customer situation, what approvals they require, the size and scale and the complexity of the deal. So it’s a continuation of what we’ve seen. Sometimes it’s in your favor, sometimes it’s not. And that’s what we saw.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Kirk Materne from Evercore ISI.

Kirk Materne : Paul, just — there’s going to be a lot of discussion about migrations over the next couple of years. How should we think about sort of the services work around all this, meaning you’re going to have a lot of customers, obviously, going through the migration process? How do you make sure that there’s not sort of a bottleneck from a services perspective so that — and maybe there’s just not enough work, so that’s not that big of a deal, but I was just kind of curious, how do you make sure that the right customers, especially your big ones, are aligned with either your own services capabilities or your GSI partners. Can you just talk about that a little bit?

Paul Shawah: Yes, sure. And one of the things we’re laser focused on right now is making the migration as repeatable as possible, and that’s going to include some product work that we’re doing to automate some of the migration. But it also includes scaling out the Vault CRM services team, and we have people now dedicated and focused to that. Part of this is focus pays off. And this is specific, the kind of thing that we think about when we think about executing really well. Part of our strategy is to execute really well in this area, and we’re putting dedicated people on it. And that’s going to help us create the focus but also the team to expand and scale and support customers as they — we know roughly what that time line looks what we’ll be ready to support it.

And I would say the third part of it is enabling our partner ecosystem. So we are working closely to make sure that they know what our role is and they know what their role is and how they can help us and how we can scale, support customers really across the globe. Remember, this is the U.S., it’s Europe, it’s Asia, it’s LatAm. So we have a lot of customers, and we’re making sure that we’re ready with our own tooling, our services and our partners.

Kirk Materne : Yes. And you mentioned that — go ahead, please.

Peter Gassner: I would chime in there a little bit. One way to think about, it is you had a big bolus of work around Veeva’s CRM between 2012 and 2017. Roughly speaking, maybe we move somewhere around half the market, a bit less than that from Siebel or Cegedim or some other things to be this year. And that was a big bolus of work that was done by Veeva services and our partners Accenture and regional partners over a 5-year period. Now we have this 5 year period from 2025 to 2030, we probably have about as much work to do. Now we have more movement to do because we have to move 90% of the industry over, but the effort is less than — significantly less than half of the effort and certainly in the migration it’s less than half. So we have to mobilize our own services and the partners to do that. But these are things that we know how to do.

Kirk Materne : That’s helpful, Peter, for dimensionalizing that. And then, Brent, one more just on billings. In terms of the duration changes that you’re seeing, are these bigger customers that just want to break it up into bite-size pieces from a payments perspective, smaller customers just trying to save cash. I was just wondering if there’s any commonality that you’re seeing that’s sort of hitting duration right now? I realize it fluctuates, but has anything changed, I guess, on that front?

Brent Bowman: Again, nothing fundamentally changed. I mean specifically, a couple of the large items were simple co-terms. So you have — they’re just co-terming to the number of deals they have onto a common date. So it’s nothing more fundamental than that.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jilinda Singh from Truist Securities.