Veeva Is Building Its Own Cloud Platform, Plus Other New Capabilities for Managing Life Sciences Sales and Marketing

Since its founding in 2007, when it introduced cloud computing to life sciences sales teams, Veeva has used the Salesforce.com cloud platform upon which it built dedicated applications. Now, at its 2023 Commercial Summit (Boston, May 1-3), the company fleshed out what this previous news will mean for its customers in life sciences, where it is the dominant customer relationship-management (CRM) provider (and, increasingly, its presence in managing R&D activities for that industry).

Heretofore, Veeva customers paid a pass-through subscription to Salesforce.com, according to Paul Shawah, EVP, commercial strategy; the arrangement between Veeva and Salesforce will officially begin expiring in 2025, but Veeva customers staying with the Salesforce platform will be supported through 2030. Pilot customers will begin working with the new platform, Veeva Vault, next year; Veeva also announced a deeper partnership with Accenture for Veeva Vault CRM customers who want to update or revise their software implementation, rather than a straight “life and shift” implementation.

New capabilities will be added to Veeva Vault CRM: a free “service center” feature that can organize such functions as internal sales teams or inbound call response, and the CRM Bot, which employs artificial intelligence (AI) tools to enable sales reps to generate texts or documents (taking advantage of the so-called “generative AI” tools now becoming popular).

At the meeting, the company also announced new capabilities in its Link product (for identifying key accounts and their relationships) and Compass, which will soon include deep analytics on providers in addition to the current data on patients.