Veeva Systems offers pharmaceutical and other highly regulated chemical manufacturers a cloud-based solution to make their employees and companies be more efficient and in compliance with the vast array of regulations these industries face. Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner modestly says that “we are just helping people to be more efficient.”
Peter Gassner, CEO and co-founder of Veeva Systems recently discussed how the company is growing by “reinventing” itself:
Veeva On Target To Be a Billion Dollar Company
We laid out a goal to be a billion dollar revenue company in 2015, saying we will get there in 2020 sometime. In our recent analyst day, we let people know we are actually a year ahead of schedule. I’m really proud of our Veeva team that executed so well on our long-term plan.
Reinvention Makes a Great Company
If you step back to when we went public about five years ago and if you look at our progress we’ve almost tripled the number of products we have, revenue is up four times, and profits are up six times. What makes a great company is people that can reinvent themselves, a team that can create new products, keep customers happy, and uses success to grow the business. Veeva has done that. Certainly, Adobe and Salesforce have done that as well.
Life science is a serious business. It’s a big business, a $1.6 trillion business. It’s doing some amazing things to improve and extend human life and we are proud to be part of that. When you are dealing with human lives, there are certain regulations and process and procedures mainly to do with safety for the patient.
We Are Just Helping People to Be More Efficient
You have to follow those things and some of those procedures, unfortunately, have been on paper until Veeva got in there with the right cloud software. We are just helping people be more efficient. The people inside those life sciences companies I think are doing their jobs slightly better because they get to use this modern software technology to help them do what they love to do which is making medicine for patients.
This Veeva team can accomplish so much. We started out in the commercial side of life sciences and then we moved into the R&D, the clinical trial area. That was our second big act with our Veeva Vault and has been huge for Veeva. Now we are going outside of life sciences with a product called Quality One.
A New Big Frontier for Veeva
You have to be careful when you are manufacturing and distributing a chemical, cosmetics, consumer packaged goods, and laundry detergent. You have to be very careful about that type of stuff and they have been burdened with client-server processes and paper processes. We want to come in and modernize that and help people do better work in those industries. That is a big frontier for Veeva.
Sometimes in these industries, you will be doing a very complex manufacturing process and you when you want to change that process, a lot of that is done on paper and spreadsheets still. They haven’t automated it because there hasn’t been a good cloud-based system so that’s what we are helping them with.