Veeva Systems Inc Q4 FY2026 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, and welcome to Viva's Fiscal 2026 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Conference Call for the quarter and fiscal year ended January 31st, 2026. As a reminder, we posted prepared remarks on Viva's Investor Relations website just after 1 p.m. Pacific today. We hope you have had a chance to read them before the call. Today's call will be used primarily for Q&A. With me today for Q&A are Peter Gassner, our Chief Executive Officer, Paul Schawa, EVP Strategy, and Brian Van Wagner, our Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements regarding trends, our strategies, and the anticipated performance of the business, including guidance regarding future financial results. These forward-looking statements will be based on our current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially. Please refer to the risks listed in our earnings release and the risk factors included in our most recent filing on Form 10-Q. or looking statements made during the call are being made as of today march 4th 2026 based on the facts available to us today if this call is replayed or viewed after today the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information biva disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward looking statement we may discuss our guidance on today's call but we will not provide any further guidance or updates on our performance during the quarter unless we do so in a public forum on the call we may also discuss certain non-GAAP metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results a reconciliation to comparable gap metrics can be found in today's earnings release

and in the supplemental investor presentation both of which are available on our website with that thank you for joining us i'll turn the call over to peter thank you gunner and welcome everyone to the call we had a strong finish to the year delivering results ahead of our guidance total revenue in the quarter was 836 million with non-GAAP operating income of 366 million for the year total revenue was 3.195 billion and non-GAAP operating income was 1.434 billion 2025 was an outstanding year for viva we surpassed our three billion dollar revenue run rate goal and deepened our strategic partnerships across the life sciences industry through innovation and customer success. We'll now open up for your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Please pick up your handset when asking a question. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question is from Joe Vronwenk with Baird. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you for the time tonight. I wanted to ask if Viva is starting to see some programs funded maybe in the name of AI readiness. I would imagine for a top 20 to commit to Viva in any of the R&D areas, RTSM, quality, safety, it would seem you're going eyes wide open into really viewing Viva as a future foundation for everything AI-related that is to come. And so I'm wondering if there's an AI influence that you're starting to see that's contributing to the strong demand here at your end.

This is Peter. I wouldn't say that's a broad theme. There are cases, and it varies by area. More of the theme is, hey, we need core systems that will scale. Either their existing systems are aging, so we talked about a top 20 safety win. Their existing system, because they were doing other things over the past years and just lots of deferred maintenance, and that was going to become a critical risk for the company. So they have to get that in. There are some times where it will help our data business. They're trying to clean up their clean reference data because they know AI is not going to work because, okay, garbage in, garbage out. So there's a little bit of that, but it's more, it's just modernizing, getting rid of the legacy and looking for increased automation. AI, you know, it's really the goal there is automation, right? That's the goal. But AI is not the only way you do automation. Part of it is you do automation through a system to have clean workflow. So it's a driver, but I wouldn't say it's a major driver.

Okay. Thanks, Peter. On CRM, Brian made, I thought, interesting comments at a January conference around how that business is going to become about 10% of Viva in 2030, so call it a $600 million run rate. I think that's a bigger number than many would have penciled in at the start of events and transitions happening there. Are there things like service center or campaign manager that are adding incrementally to the forecast? And how would you think about those increments rolling in versus the timing of what you know will roll off and probably that 28 and 29 timeframe?

Yeah, Joe, that's right. We did talk about CRM being roughly 20% of our total revenue today, going to about 10% by the 2030 timeframe. And that's primarily driven by a lot of the growth that you're going to see. We have a broad, diverse business that's growing along multiple dimensions. So, and CRM is relatively stable. So, we project CRM will be a nice, stable business for us over the long term.

And that includes, to your question, some of the add-on products that you've mentioned, like Campaign Manager and additional revenue from Service Center and other things that we may create over time we may develop over time but yeah that's uh think about that as the total kind of crm uh seat based uh revenue uh in 2030. now i'll just put a few puts and takes on that um the add-on products you know patient crm service center campaign manager those those can grow and also there's some puts and takes in the core crm so you know a couple of the large top 20s for example we're on iqvia okay those are going on over to viva we didn't have those before um some medtech

companies yes and salesforce is getting a few of those as well so there's put some there's we might focus on the takes which um but there's put some takes in that area and then the add-ons will grow your next question is from slaket kelia with barclays please go ahead okay great can you hear me okay yes yes okay excellent yes awesome hey guys thanks for thanks for taking my questions here and nice finish to the year um peter maybe if i could start with you um you know just just to stay on the ai theme a little bit you know you spend a lot of time with customers on on both the r d and commercial sides of the house what are they saying about ai adoption right now within the life sciences industry. Maybe what role do they see the big LLM providers playing and what role do they see Viva playing, if that makes sense?

Yeah, and in fact, you're right. I do spend a lot of time with customers. I was just reflecting when you asked that. That's one of the best parts of my day. And every day, at least, I'm talking to one customer or another. It might be an individual person by text or a conference call or email or whatever it is. So, first of all, there's extreme interest in ai because you know they're they're getting pressured by their bosses and their peers right to to be okay how do we get more official with ai because it's a new competing paradigm and i would say they bucket into three maybe four types of people that might be able to help them one is the infrastructure providers the llm providers themselves anthropic open ai but microsoft in that camp amazon and video those types of things what how can they be leveraged there uh and then they would look for point solution providers hey there's a specialized group of people who in the specialized department and they can do this proof of concept or maybe scale it for me here and then there's their own employees doing custom software and then there's system integrators and then you get to the core application people like eva like workday like SAP. And so when they're generally talking to us, they want us to provide more AI solutions that are tightly integrated with their core systems because they trust Viva and they know we deliver quality and really know when we say something, it's going to work. It's going to work because our reputation is on the line versus a small startup can just say whatever they want, right? It doesn't really matter. So they want us to get in there and make it work and they want us always to go to go faster so I feel that's you know we have our customers really want us to win in AI applications and so we have a right to win and we just have to execute so it's pretty exciting and then some of them have projects going with us for example in that in the promotional materials management area and they're pretty excited like that I can have a winning AI application that really works and is really durable and is from Viva because they've been, a lot of them have been burned on a lot of experiments, but it's not easy for customers to admit failed experiments because, you know, that's just the dynamics. You don't like to admit that. And failed is too hard of a word. Sometimes the experiment doesn't work out, but it's not a failure. You got a lot of learnings, but the experiments that can actually scale, they're rare so far, and they know Viva's, oh, we won't do things unless we can scale them.

That's great and very, very helpful perspective, Peter. Brian, maybe for my follow-up for you, I was wondering if we could talk about the CrossX business here a little bit in fiscal 27. Obviously, you had a fantastic year in 26, so should we think about this year as a tough comp year, or do you see some of the same trends continuing into 27?

A second. I think both of those can be true. CrossX had an outstanding year last year, and it certainly exceeded our expectations. We're starting to lap some of those in Q4 and certainly into Q1. You'll recall that was the major driver of outperformance in Q1 of last year. So the compares do get tougher, but that is a business that's executing really well with a long runway for growth.

And so we continue to expect very healthy growth from the CrossX team. very helpful thanks guys your next question is from brian peterson with raymond james please go ahead uh congrats gentlemen very strong quarters so brian wanted to start with you uh i've got that question any help on bridging the gap between the 13 growth for subscription in fiscal year 20 27 versus the 11 growth in normalized villains or fy 27 yeah for fiscal or 27?

Yeah, I think the main thing as you think about, you know, subs growth in 27, Brian, is, you know, we've got some, we just talked about CrossX, so we've got, you know, a little bit of slowing growth in commercial, very healthy growth, but just as CrossX laughs, some of those harder compares, and we've talked about CRM being a more mature business. In R&D, you know, you'll see that the growth rate shifts a bit, and that's really driven by the shift from growth coming from our mature products like etmf to the really big new products like rtsm and edc and safety and limbs and so those products are very large and growing fast but still early and getting to scale and so you're primarily seeing the effect of of that mix shift in in the delta there between um subs and and billings but it's not a major effect and we we remain very uh pleased with the progress and trajectory and the path towards our 2030 goals got it it may be a follow-up for paul i you have 125 plus customers live on vault crm you know i'd love to understand for that customer

cohort and even some that are looking at the transition uh what are you seeing in terms of pipeline development of some of the other products and it would be curious about that cross out opportunity thanks guys yeah brian uh you're right in the prepared remarks i think we said 125 plus live actually it's the actual number is closer to 140 so we're doing just really really well In Vault CRM, please, with our execution from the very largest of companies all the way to the very smallest and pretty much across every region. And, yes, what we are seeing is, in some cases, when those migrations happen, it creates an opportunity to add a new product that they didn't have before. We've seen that in examples with network and open data. A couple of the top 20s that we've announced, as they went to Vault CRM, they expanded globally with network and open data. And then also with some of the newer add-ons, some of the small and mid-sized companies, they're adopting some of the new products that we have, like they're turning on Service Center, they're turning on Campaign Manager.

So it's absolutely an opportunity for us to pull a lot of that through, and I expect that's going to continue over time. your next question is from alexai gogolev with gp morgan please go ahead hello everyone uh peter uh building on the ai theme viva theory has mission critical software strong network effect proprietary data and domain expertise how do your customers rank those key elements when they consider Viva's right to win against those LLM infrastructure peers?

Yeah, I'm not sure how they would really rank that. I think they would kind of view it as all together. You know, Viva understands our systems. They understand our processes. They understand our technology. But and more so, you know, many of them think of Viva as a company that's delivered on everything we've, you know, said we would do over the last 15 years. So the trust is there. And it's not just buying trust, it's earned trust. We are a company that really, we really take customer success seriously. So when we're committed to do something, we're going to do it. And we won't get a sale, you know, by committing to something we can't do. That's what we don't want to do. So I would say trust is the number one. And, you know, obviously they know that we know our business and we're tech experts.

So that's kind of that's kind of how they see it um it's pretty straightforward thank you peter and brian um appreciate that you and peter has confirmed the target of top 20 that you hope will switch to both crm do you still think you may get the commitment from the remaining four customers by mid of calendar 26 and uh also related to the customer topic looks like customer growth has accelerated to five percent what drove that yeah so we as it relates to top 20 uh so most of the

decisions have been made there's a handful roughly five that are left uh we do expect uh we've said roughly 20 roughly 14 of 20 where we expect it will end up to be and and we still we're on track for that. Nothing has changed there. Maybe it's 13, maybe it's 15, but we think 14 is closest to the pin. Those decisions will play out this year. Some of them will happen over the next couple of months, or there may be a few that go later in the year for no other reason than company-specific things. There's a couple of customers that have some launches that are upcoming, so they're obviously prioritizing that over anything else. We're on track in top 20. we think it'll end up at roughly 14 of top 20. We're doing well there.

I think the second part of your question was around the growth rate in customer count. Did I hear that correctly? I think so. I think you asked about the 5% growth in customer count. I think what you're seeing there is just really strong execution from the team.

We talked over the past few cycles about the progress we're making in the basics area, which is meant for some of the small emerging biotechs, and we've seen really good execution with that team uh in both commercial and r d your next question is from ken wong with openheimer and co please go ahead thank you for taking my question uh i wanted to maybe touch on professional services looks like there was some outperformance there uh can you talk about what segment saw that outperformance and then as we think about you know fiscal 27 uh should we assume the gross margin profile of that services pipeline is consistent with 26.

Hey Ken this is Brian I'll pick that one up so yeah very strong execution from the team in FY26 and going into FY27 on services the main driver of growth there continues to be business consulting but but also the R&D team growing very healthily as well as other areas like our digital events business and commercial as well We've had some of the uptick that we expected in CRM migration activity, and so you see that reflected in the top line. And we've been hiring to support that demand. You can see that in the margin profile over Q3 and Q4, continuing to run very profitably and expect that to continue over the coming year.

Got it.

And then just a quick follow-up on the, you know, you mentioned on billings no longer giving the quarterly guide um you know i guess as we think about our models is it at least loosely fair to assume typical seasonality that we've seen these uh these last few years yeah thanks for that question ken so yeah our plan for the coming years we'll continue to provide annual normalized billings we'll update that on a quarterly basis alongside of our other metrics you've heard it say for several cycles we think that's the better indicator of the underlying momentum of the business so we're not going to give quarterly guidance but with that said we do expect the seasonality to be directionally similar to last year okay fantastic thanks a lot

brian your next question is from stan bernstein with wells fargo security please go ahead hi thanks for taking my questions so in the prepared remarks you mentioned a top 20 standardizing on rtsm i'm curious will rtsm have a similar ram to edc or is there a different consideration there and i want to understand the selling motion here was this a competitive takeaway uh does this top 20 standardize on any other major solution for you uh let's let's see the selling motion there and the ramping these are long-term ramping deals with rtsm it's rtsm is a significant

get product area, you know, you could think of it as as significant as the EDC area. So it's because it's very critical in what it does, shipping around drug supplies and blinded drug supplies to research sites all around the world and randomizing the patients into the right cohorts. This is extremely detailed and critical work. um the selling motion there is different than many of other products because our our especially the top 20 said they buy these rtsm solutions and services almost on a study by study or therapeutic area by therapeutic area basis and and we think viva can be just the enterprise solution for that we have the scale to do that we're not a small standalone rtsm vendor We're a big Viva that has a lot of scale and flex. But we have an outstanding standalone RTSM product that's the best product in the business. So now you can standardize on Viva and get a lot of synergies. So the selling motion is often showing people that you don't have to do it the old way. You don't have to have an RTSM procurement department in your company. So it's a different selling motion. He asked if the customer, the other products that the customer has, the customer has been a longstanding clinical customer. They did actually buy some other clinical products from us in the clinical operations area at the same time as this. But these are, you know, I wouldn't say they're completely separate sales cycles, but it is definitely this was our different sales cycle. And we're really happy with that. It's a milestone deal for Viva and for the industry. and I hope to have more of those over the next year or two. Now our focus right there in the RTSM is going to be delivering on that promise for the customers so that they see these synergies of standardizing. That's the number one thing we've got to do.

Thanks, and then a quick follow-up on AI. So obviously some of your clients are helping solutions that maybe are not widely available yet. but can you maybe speak to early proof points that you're seeing on AI agents that I guess you're planning to roll out over the course of the year? Are there any sort of ROI or tidbits from clients that you're hearing that you can kind of comment on ahead of these releases?

Yeah, the one that's farthest along and we have multiple projects underway is the commercial content area. and that the roi is just is just very clear it's faster faster content lower cost to create that content and that's what it's all about lower cost to create that content you know i won't quote specific numbers but that's pretty clear to quantify faster content just means better launches that means stop drives the top line before the patent on that product expires. So I get asked by that by customers all the time. They know in the age of really omni-channel experience for their customers, which are patients and healthcare providers, you know, omni-channel experience that includes AI doctors and large language models, the speed that you can get your content out there in a compliant way is just going to be critical so the old way of approving content is just not going to suffice anymore you need to approve it you can't you can't do this but it's not legal to just throw content out there that's not compliant they need to do it but the old way of doing it is just not going to supply so there's intense interest in that area thank you your next question is from rishi jaluria with rbc please go ahead oh wonderful

thanks so much for taking my questions nice to see continuing momentum in the business uh a few questions maybe first uh we'd love to start out by exploring a little bit more um you know obviously anthropic made a lot of noise uh when they launched quality life sciences and you a lot of deals and maybe lost in that was Viva as an enabling and launch partner of Cross and Life Sciences. So Peter, how should you be thinking about the opportunity for Viva to work with Antropic, OpenAI, all the different kind of model providers out there, provide your domain expertise, provide the workflow expertise, and kind of have a, you know, rising tide list all boat situation rather than obviously the current market view of it being more cannibalistic and then they've got to put it all up uh yeah yeah i certainly don't view uh being cannibalistic uh for viva absolutely not i mean you know let me state that clearly ai is a it's a very positive thing so i'll get back to that in a minute but you know address the higher level ai is not replacing software yeah that's

just not happening and and not all software is the same i'll make a point on that so ai that's not going to replace things like Windows, iOS, Excel, or core systems of record, like SAP Workday or Viva. These core systems, they're essential. And we'll add core AI systems, as well SAP, as well Workday. And these core systems are going to be used by agents as well as human users. Yeah, that's new, but these systems are essential and they're not going away. But AI is going to enable a lot of new kinds of long tail software you know it's it's software could be only used by a few people or a specific software group in a company company specific software or types of software that couldn't be done before you know self-driving cars and trucks dramatically better coding tools you know better google search and then in our case industry specific ai applications so really in these early days of AI, and people get a lot of hyper, and they think it's going to play out over, you know, one or two months. It's not. It's going to play out over 10 or 20 years. Now for Viva, specifically for Viva, AI, that's going to help us create and improve our core systems faster than before, so that's where it will help our software development, but not at the expense of quality, predictability, regulatory compliance, and the real value that customers depend on. Now, as it relates to Anthropic or OpenAI and others, that's an engine, and their engine will be used for lots of things. You know, they will be used by the VEVA applications or by custom applications that the customers develop. So, yes, it's good for those large model providers. Now they have to watch their profitability, et cetera. But they're an engine. They're the new wave of cloud computing, you know? So that's the new AWS, et cetera. So it's a good business there. But just as AWS itself and also Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, et cetera, that was very good business for those hyperscalers. But I think what sometimes gets lost, that actually enabled Viva. You couldn't have built the industry cloud for life sciences. You couldn't have built those long tail of applications without those cloud infrastructure providers. And it's the same way here with these large language models. Viva could not build the AI applications that we're going to build without these foundational LLMs. So I don't know if I'll use this word correctly. I think the word is symbiotic. I think so. I'm more of a short, I'm more of a Hemingway really than anything else, but I think it's very symbiotic. And at times, especially in the early days, it can be chaotic.

As people are bumping around that's okay but the large i should write a poem i guess um but the the large you know patterns are very clear and it will be very symbiotic very helpful and then just quickly as a follow-up on on that kind of thought experiment uh peter and looking forward to your collection of poems uh uh soon after this but as you think about you know you talk about using ai for for automating a lot within viva maybe building on top of that uh you know given how mission critical this is and maybe how much it can be tied not just to better revenue outcomes but more importantly better patient and better health care outcomes and better societal outcomes do you see an opportunity to not just automate and drive you know faster time to value and efficiency but even leveraging ai within the digital platform to allow for better drug you know development safer drugs out of the market you know basically better outcomes you know rather than just faster time to value.

Yeah, excellent question. And I hope I don't go too long on this because I have a real passion for this area. After working 18 years in this industry, I really know about it, I feel. And I really care about the people in it. And I see how it impacts patients. It's a real thing. Drug discovery is one thing. There's a lot of focus on that. And yes, that'll get faster. But that's not the real bottleneck. The real bottleneck is the clinical trial, the experiment that's done in the human. And we're always going to have to do those experiments in a human and the human biology runs at the same speed. So that always has to be done and the bottleneck now is finding the patients around the world that can get in those trials. So that's one. But the biggest bottleneck by far is there's a patient somewhere out there in the world, they're diagnosed with something by a doctor. How long did it take them to get diagnosed and when did they get the right medicine that will best treat them? That's where 90% of the value in life sciences is lost, is lost because of that impediment, the basics of is the patient informed, can they get to the right doctor, is the right doctor informed, is the payer informed. That's where 90% of the value is lost and, you know, I said value is lost, but on the other side, there's a lot of people who don't get treated correctly or timely around the world uh and that affects productivity that affects their family and some of it not all these people are you know in their 90s some of them are young parents or just young children if you saw our um partnership with biomarin and you look at what they're doing they're treating genetic diseases primarily young and disadvantaged children who have parents and brothers and sisters but this is really important for us and ai can definitely definitely definitely bridge that gap. AI doctors and large language models can help bridge that gap between doctors and patients so maybe that 90 percent inefficiency goes down to 50 percent and that'll be a tremendous boom and yes Viva will definitely play a part in that by connecting our customers the industry to its external ecosystem and its external ecosystems are clinical researchers patients and doctors and regulators and the industry is not well connected and AI is going to provide a better method to do that. So I think what people are missing is the benefit of AI over the next 10, 20 years on the life sciences industry because we'll be able to treat more patients faster and that will transfer into our revenue and societal benefits.

Your next question is from jaylandra singh with trust securities please go ahead thank you thanks for taking my question and congrats in a strong quarter i want to uh talk about your comment uh that guidance assumes no significant changes in the macro environment just curious with former companies having some clarity on mfn tariff and with some deals with current administration over the last six months or so why you don't think trends could start moving in the right direction as these large former companies now has some more clarity. Are you just being more prudent in your guidance or do you still see some costs that any pharma clients have to navigate?

Yeah, Jalindra, the uncertainty has been out there for some time. We've been tracking it. The industry has been tracking it. You're right. There has been a trend towards things becoming more certain across a number of different dimensions. But I think there's some cautious optimism about what's happening. Certainty is always better than uncertainty. And I think in a number of areas, things have become more certain. I think that's generally good for the industry. But, you know, we're in conversations with our customers. We know how they're thinking. We know how they're planning for the next year. So we provide guidance that's best in line what we anticipate the projects that they'll be focused on and less related to the specific ups and downs of the macro environment. Because over the short term they're generally less influenced by that they're more influenced by these longer planning cycles so we uh we we do our best to incorporate uh kind of the discussions and conversations and and the guidance more so than the overall macro environment got it and a quick follow-up on the crm side uh you recently moved the crm end of support date from september of 2030 to december 29 what were the key drivers there are you still contractually paying sales for through 2030.

And then related to that, I mean, you guys talked about a lot of other wins outside of top 20. Can you give us some number around what is your win rate in that mid-size farmer segment? Is it better than 70% lower? Can we give some color about the mid-size farmer, how fast that's moving on CRM?

Yeah, so the drivers, you're right. We moved the date to December of 29. It used to be roughly September of 2030. So we pulled it in about eight or nine months. The reason we did that is, one, is Vault CRM is going well. I mentioned earlier we're close to 140 customers live on Vault CRM. The momentum there is fantastic. The product is actually better than Viva CRM, and the migrations are going well. So we're executing well there, and we don't have any customers with projects planned into that 2030 timeframe. So what we want to do, you know, the further you get out, there's more uncertainty. So what we want to do is make sure there's no stragglers that go into 2030. So that was the intent there. And we think that's good for the industry and good for customers. You also asked about the royalty payments to Salesforce, and those will wind down as customers roll off of Salesforce. So once everybody's off, then those payments will stop. And then I think you had a last question I think was about win rates, and win rates specifically outside of the top 20. We spent a lot of time talking about top 20 outside of top 20 we expect the ring rates to be even higher than inside of top 20 mainly because those companies they they want a product that they know will work they want a trusted partner a strategic partner somebody who's innovating and and actually delivering agentic crm today um this that was our promise was that our customers can innovate get the crm get to to agentic serum fast and now it's available with with viva so i think it's a big advantage for viva with those small and mid-sized companies just going with somebody that they trust and that they know will will work great thanks a lot your next question is from dylan baker

with william blair please go ahead hey gentlemen i appreciate it maybe um peter sticking with the the ai theme and topic you kind of called out the value of platforms versus point solutions i wonder and it kind of ties into trust i guess as well too but i wonder um how you kind of delineate between those and how you think about uh the your ability serving kind of the end-to-end workflow across the industry to maybe help solve the opaqueness or the uncertainty uh around the perception of ai and how that relates to maybe your ability to kind of quantify the value relative to a point solution um that's maybe looking at the markets um if that makes sense

and maybe how that kind of ties into your ability to the right to win if you will in that intelligence layer yeah i would say trust certainly has uh something to do with it so we have deep customer relationships we have the trust of the customers so we can get the requirements quickly but it's It's also just a skill and an operating model, you know, so we have the skills that know about the industry and have the operating model of discipline and pricing and account management, et cetera. And then I always view Viva where we're developing pieces of a puzzle that customers may purchase and they put in, but also, and sometimes not as relevant to the customers, we're developing a plan and continually maintaining the plan about how the puzzle pieces fit together so every time they get more viva pieces you know it more fits together in their puzzle let's say they're doing something with us in safety and they start doing an ai solution with us in safety and two years from now they they go with us in clinical data management and a year later they put in an AI solution for clinical data management. Well, that AI solution is going to work with their safety solution pretty much out of the box. And that's a benefit they never planned out for, but they're going to get. So I think customers start to see that it kind of fits together with Viva. I think the way back in the day you saw this with Microsoft on the desktop too, way back in the day, they start to see, oh, it kind of fits together with Microsoft. Microsoft will take responsibility for fitting things together, and there's value in that alignment. That's our right to win, and what's given us the ability to execute is just our operating model and our discipline, you know, for making great software.

Very helpful. And then I'm not sure if this is maybe for Paul or Brian here as well, but I think there were comments in the prepared remarks as well too around the opportunity to maybe lean more aggressively into the cro channel this might be a little bit more down market it might be tied to viva basics but any kind of color on what you're seeing with traction and adoption of kind of bundling more services uh and software to tie into kind of peter's point right there uh and maybe how you can kind of leverage that and lean more into the enterprise segments uh if that is tailored down market today thank you yeah um i'll take that one this is peter This is about the CRO or contract research organization, you know,

basically using them as a channel for what we call the study-by-study business. So when a small biotech, usually when they run a clinical trial, they will get those services from a contract research organization. And with those clinical services, the CRO will provide technology as well. and so far we have not you know participated too much in that the cro's have had their established patterns and they've used a different variety of vendors and some homegrown things to provide to their customers but we're we're putting an effort now and we're making starting to make progress where they would they would offer the viva technology um as they would oem the viva technology to their to their customers for that study and sometimes this can be significant right it's it's not unheard of to for this you know technology if if a lot of it is from viva on a big study that might be five hundred thousand dollars that might be a million dollars and there's a lot of studies that start every year so this can be a very the study by study business internally in vivo we we know that can be a billion dollar business for a couple reasons The breadth of products we have, so the EDC is sold study-by-study, the RTSM is sold study-by-study, the ECOA is sold study-by-study. Those are three very, very big product areas. So that's what we're talking about there. It's not new products, although we will adjust our products a little bit for that market. It's more a new focus on a go-to-market motion and operating model inside of our company.

Your next question is from David Hindley. And in the interest of time, please now limit yourself to one question. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. Just in time. Thank you for squeezing me in. So, Peter, I wanted to come back to some of your comments on automation. So it seems like to me that maybe to the point that you also just made around standardizing on, and I'm focused particularly on, development cloud, should drive a lot of automation. You highlighted that AI is a way to automate, but not the only way. I guess I'm wondering if AI is shining a brighter light on the benefits of standardizing on Viva for that automation. And in that context, I'm going to ask kind of the flip side of the question would be, what's your view of the EDC market, sub-market within your development cloud portfolio, and why hasn't that been moving in your direction more lately? Thank you.

Well, let's see, automate, well, standardization and standardizing on Viva, you know, I haven't really seen that as a theme to say, hey, standardizing on Viva is a way we can accelerate with AI in a few pockets, but not as a theme. Now, I think that theme is probably coming, but we have to really prove out that, you know, Viva AI is just available this year, right? So once we start really proving out the value and some of these point solutions start not doing so well etc that's i think where where it can really accelerate when we you know a year from now two years from now when we have companies thinking i uh big companies thinking i increased my revenue by 40 million because i i lowered the time of drug approvals because of the viva regulatory solution allowed me to get back faster to the health authorities around the world that's when that's when things really start coming. But we have to deliver on that. The promise is there, but I think I put in my prepared remarks, I used the words, it's hard. This is very hard stuff. It's not simple, and so we have to get it right. And then, so you talked about standardization, and then I did not write down the second part of your question. Could you ask that again? I'm sorry, David. Just the EDC component of standardizing on development cloud and i think you've been relatively stable flat but that's an area where you could penetrate more top 20s it would seem yeah i i would say yeah hit a bit of an air pocket there um in the edc and that's just you know the random timings of life i guess um so we certainly hope to make progress there in the coming years and i think we have a structural advantage because the customers really, they really want the combined clinical operations and clinical data management to work together. And we announced a real groundbreaking thing on our eSource initiative. We have some late adopters there, yeah, and they also have other priorities that they have to get after, right? So it's a question of priorities. I think we'll, you know, arguably we're the leader now, you know, it's us and metadata, although they do better in this study by study area but I think we're on a path to leadership I guess that's one high level thing to know our our competitive environment has never been stronger so I can I feel like I can see where we're going as long as we don't get arrogant as long as we keep executing we will we will complete that vision but do you complete it you complete that in five years and seven years you know when does the edc breakthrough come does it come in two years or one year or four years those things are hard to predict uh david but i we're well set up to get there

because we have a structural advantage appreciate that thank you your next question is from andrew de gaspari with bnp paribas please go ahead thanks for fitting me in i just wanted a sort of a two part question, if I may, on the vault CRM, the 10 that you said will stick with vault CRM. I just wondered, how firm are those commitments? We've been hearing some questions from investors that some could still decide to move despite signing with you. And then separately, as the services revenue picks up, it sounds like those are tied to the two go live decisions. Should we expect that to ramp up this year in fiscal 27 as more of those customers go live? And if so, have you accounted for that in the guidance? Thank you.

Yeah, I'll take the first part of that question and I'll leave the services revenue part of it to Brian. So your question is, you know, how firm are those commitments? I think with Viva commitments, they're generally pretty firm. nothing is ever set in stone or final, but I feel really confident about the decisions that have already been made. Why? Because we have close to 140 customers live. We have two top 20s, big, complex companies operating in all of the major markets who are now live on Vault CRM. So, we've proven um that this is the fastest path to get to crm and agentic crm um so if you're really confident we're executing well i i don't see i don't see any risk there i think actually there's a greater risk that a customer that decided to do salesforce and tries to go down the path of a custom build project a big systems integrator project i think there's greater risk that those companies see how difficult it is and come back to Viva. So I think that's our opportunity over the next few years.

And then, Andrew, on the second part of your question around. I'll just put a fine point on that. It's Peter. So those top 10 customers that have picked us, all those projects were started, and they're all going, and they're all going to a very stable product that's already live. So I think those are pretty clear. Now, on the other hand, not all the salesforce projects are going so well and they're different so i know of one top 20 that has i won't say the exact number but they have a large number of development team contracted in india from a third party system integrator they're coding a basically a custom solution and that may work out well or them yet that might not work out well and at some point there may be a new regime in and they might not want that custom build so there's a complete difference in uncertainty um you know those salesforce projects they might work well but even the customers they know it's going on to a speculative product that's not the case with either so it's very different

and andrew i'll jump in quickly this is brian yeah i think you hit for the cycle with all three of us your question nice job um on the services guide the short answer is yes the we've got top 20 projects at various phases wrapping up well underway kicking off over the course of the year and that's all factored into our guidance for fy27 thank you your next question is from ryan mcdonald with medium please go ahead taking the question and congrats on the nice quarter this is uh matt shay on for ryan maybe sticking with the the ai theme you know you've noted in the past how AI could be a game changer in safety and how you could potentially see faster adoption there

than quality. But maybe if we take a step back, could you comment on why you're leaning into agent development and safety given how historically reluctant to change that segment of the market has been?

And then do you think these two new agents in April can unlock demand or do you envision this or uh or how do you ultimately envision this market adopting ai thanks yeah we safety momentum we can generally call it the safety surge we've been winning some deals and uh the projects are going well we had another top 20 win uh this quarter and we had our first top 20 go live with signal and workbench um now in terms of ai it's pretty clear there in ai and there's a lot of human processing of case intake and case narrative generation that's done by people that's not necessarily that high risk uh but it's there has to be done well and it's expensive to hire those those people and it's not easy so in safety it's just very clear it's about um replacing that type of labor with with automation with ai software now what is uh risky for the customers or what they would claim is really important is when they switch from their current core safety system to Viva, that project has to go really well. But that's not easy to do. So that's more where the risk aversion is. But I think they're starting to realize if you want to have a potential future where you have a great core safety system that has safety AI on top of it and is connected to your other systems in your company Viva is the only place you're going to do that unless you're going to build it yourself i think most people are starting also to realize now that it's not that easy to build and maintain these things themselves so that's kind of what's leaning into our favor on the ai now of course we have to deliver it but what it does make that market slow is people are very reluctant to change their core safety database because they to report to health authorities all around the world and if they can't do that they have to pull their products off the market so it's it's serious i think that sometimes people don't understand it we're not making systems that help people write better emails or better spell checker you know it's a it's a big deal for a pharmaceutical company if your products get pulled off the market so that's these things are very critical your next question is from adam hotchkiss with goldman sachs please go ahead.

Great. Thanks so much for taking the question. Two-parter, if I can, just to follow up on Rishi's from earlier. As AI speeds up clinical trial timelines and trial success rates, I'm curious, first, how this dynamic impacts how customers use Viva's R&D products. And then, second, maybe for Brian, I know that pricing models differ within the R&D portfolio, but how could this impact, if at all, customers spent on Viva? Thanks.

You know, about A.I. speeding up clinical trials, I think A.I. can speed up some and maybe in the startup and in the close down, but not that much, really. It's still based on the clinical protocol of the medicine, which is based on the time of the human body that it takes to, you know, to deal with that medicine and to prove it out. And then the patient recruitment, which I don't think is actually an A.I. problem, the patient recruitment. And so we'll speed it up, you know, some, but not so much in clinical trials. And then in terms of how, so I don't think that really impacts their view of the core VIVA, of the core VIVA systems. Brian, did you want to follow up on that one?

Yeah, I think the second part of the question was around how this can impact spend over And Adam, it's still very early there. you know what we're really focused on is product excellence and customer success right now last year was about putting the foundation in and the platform and the first agents this year is about rolling out agents and all of our product areas getting customers live refining the product really creating a lot of value and and then i think that we don't really expect it to be a major financial contributor this year it's more in the out years and still pretty early down down that journey okay thank you very much your next question is from craig head back with morgan stanley

please go ahead great thank you pete i wanted to ask the ai question maybe in a different way if i look at some of the success you've had in the r d business you know the breadth of the product offerings you've continued to layer on new capabilities being able to bundle those products or for a platform to customers, when we think about the LLM providers introducing, you know, some tools for clinical workflows, how do you think about the customer base? If they were to go direct to customer in terms of doing some things piecemeal on that versus working with, you know, kind of one large vendor with Viva, does that carry over in terms of the AI world, in terms of how the opportunity set may evolve?

I think that's very similar, right? Some people will want to experiment and do solutions on their own and see if they can get that up working in scale, but I don't think the AI vendors are really making industry-specific software applications, right? It takes a lot of dedication and effort to do that, so I think it's a very symbiotic relationship, you know, just like the cloud area you know yeah amazon didn't make industry specific applications either i don't really see why would somebody like anthropic do that right they're going to make broad applications and applications for coding itself etc that's what i feel would happen and you know this is our domain we know how to do this stuff it takes software data consulting together and uh so i think it's going to be a very symbiotic relationship yeah thank you

as a reminder please limit yourself to one question our next question is from dj heinz with canaccord genuity please go ahead hey thank you guys uh brian i'm going to take another cut at a ai finance question with you uh realizing just how early everything is here but you know based on the adoption trends, you're seeing kind of customer willingness to pay, how you're thinking about pricing. Do you expect your agentic AI offerings to be immediately accretive to margins, or will that take time? Like, help us think about the kind of the curve to profitability. You know, you're already at 45% margins. Like, how does that ramp happen, you know, as the portfolio matures?

ADJ, yeah, it's a great question. And it is, as you said, still quite early. As we're starting this year, we're really expecting to be using a token-based pricing model and so that gives a little bit of predictability around the margin profile. But that may evolve over time and it's really more around getting to product excellence and value creation and sort of less about pricing, revenue, exact margin structure. So it's not a material impact on FY27 and what the FIA plays out in the forward years.

Your next question is from Carl Kirstead with UBS. Please go ahead.

Okay, great. Maybe, Brian, just back to the numbers and the total revenue guide of 13% for fiscal 27. A year ago, you started the total revenue guide at 11, and you just finished with 16, a really strong five-point beat. So as we all assess your 13% starting point for this fiscal year, is there anything about the fiscal 26 five-point outperformance that in retrospect strikes you as somewhat non-recurring and a reason to be a little bit more cautious in terms of modeling any upside this year? Thanks so much.

Hey, Carl. yeah you know the way we think about guidance is is giving the best information we've got and calling it based on on that and so as we went into last year i think we we provided that guidance and then had pretty strong outperformance in particular out of cross-ex so that was really a major driver of the beat over the course of the year we do expect to see continued healthy growth out of cross-ex i think we would be surprised at the same level about performance but our guidance philosophy last year as this year is to give the best information that we've gotten to call it closest to the pen. So no change in the approach and not expecting specific outperformance in any area like we saw last year.

Okay. Thank you, Brian.

Your next question is from Hannah Rudolph with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead. Hi, guys.

Thank you for taking my question. Within Viva AI, what is the mix of customer adoption you're seeing right now between prepackaged agents that you've built and custom agents that they're building using viva ai and kind of by extension of that i know you have plans to roll out a lot of the r d agents this year are you seeing any customers that are so eager that they're building out these agents and workflows ahead of you launching them thank you yeah the bulk of it is with our our agents that we're designing um so part of it is our i I guess our agents are probably a little more robust on our custom tooling right now.

But if you look at our agents, there's detailed work in the agents, right? There's detailed data curation, there's detailed testing pipelines. There's a lot of logic in the agents, right? When we talk about AI agents, there's a lot of logic, you know, specific logic written in our Java code that's hard and needs great product management. So, in general, customers would rather get that solution rather than build that themselves. I think we'll see some adoption in the custom agents around a lighter use cases where they're doing, you know, little helper applications. And I think that'll start, and we'll have a good amount of that in the second half of Super helpful.

Our last question for today will be from Tyler Radke with Citi. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you for taking the question. So, going to the R&D business, a lot of great top 20 wins. It looks like the revenue outperformance on subscription was a bit stronger than normal. I guess I'm wondering, are you seeing – I know you've gotten more than half the questions on AI, but just given the success in migration tools, code completion tools, are you seeing any acceleration in implementation times driven by AI or other things and just sort of what drove that outperformance, whether it was timing or anything you'd call out. Thanks.

I'll take that one, actually. It was just good execution and some of the balls bounced our way, more of the balls bounced our way than bounced against us. So I really appreciate your question about whether implementation timelines are shortening. A couple of things are I would say yes, but that's natural as our products get better and our services people get better. We do have a push on, a big push on tech enabling our services. That really hasn't borne a lot of fruit just yet, but I do expect it to in the next year or two. um so for example we're we're working with a customer where actually they do have many they don't have metadata they have have a different edc system they've moved on to viva they want to migrate their studies and ai is helping us will help us do that faster than we could have before so i think that's not only specific to viva i think system migration is a great use case for for AI automation to cut down the time and reduce the cost of system migration. And we'll do our part in that too, but it's early days. Thank you.

The Q&A is now finished. I will turn the call back over to CEO Peter Gassner for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. And thank you to our customers for your continued partnership and to the Viva team for your outstanding work in the quarter and the year. thank you this concludes today's call thank you for attending you may now disconnect