Veeva Rolls Out New Features While Transitioning Its CRM platform
Company's annual Commercial Summit updates Veeva Vault CRM status, along with AI partnerships.
Veeva, a provider of customer relationship-management (CRM) software to the life sciences industry, updated its customers on the unusual transition it is undergoing as an enterprise software provider. Because it wanted to leave its platform technology originally licensed from Salesforce.com, it announced at last year's event that it would undertake rebuilding its CRM system with its own platform, now called Vault CRM. The changeover is not trivial; it is expected to take until 2030 for all of its hundreds of pharma clients to complete the transition, which also involves significant upgrades as Veeva clients. A handful of new clients are currently implementing Vault CRM; older Veeva clients will have "migration kits" along with Veeva consulting to affect the transition.
In return, Veeva offers a growing number of new apps—such as a new campaign manager that will streamline and synchronize data into separate sales and marketing databases—as part of an overall effort to bring all HCP data together. "The average Big Pharma company has between 100,000 and 400,000 ‘pieces’ of content in diverse databases," says Paul Shawah, EVP at Veeva. "We will bring all of that together in Vault, and make it quickly available to users."
Some of the biggest buzz at the meeting involved artificial intelligence (AI) applications, an area that Shawah says the company will support with new APIs to make commercial data available to AI apps; the company also announced an AI Partner program to engage with AI developers.
The first signup to this program is Odaia, originally a spinout from the pioneering AI program at the Univ. of Toronto, now focused on "customer science" for commercial pharma applications. Odaia's Maptual system hoovers up patient data, claims data, HCP interactions, and other data sources, then uses generative AI to provide a ready-to-use summary into the hands of field reps. Philip Poulidis, CEO, emphasizes that the AI elements of Maptual are not open to users, thus protecting against the errors that generative AI is known for; it also has a mathematics module to handle numerical analyses (something that word-based generative AI struggles to do). In working with Veeva, Odaia will be able to plug directly into Vault databases, providing fast response.
Reference
Veeva Commercial Summit. Boston, MA. https://www.veeva.com/events/commercial-summit/
