2016 Veeva R&D Summit: The Power of Unified Applications in R&D

More than 650 attendees from 140 companies descended on Philadelphia recently for the annual Veeva Global R&D Summit. The central theme at this year’s event was the power of unified cloud applications for clinical, regulatory, and quality. The action packed, three-day event brought together top industry leaders to explore how unified application suites are streamlining business processes and improving compliant collaboration throughout R&D.

Senior vice president of Veeva Vault, Jennifer Goldsmith, welcomed the audience with a look back at past R&D Summits and how it has evolved to be the premier event for clinical, regulatory, and quality leaders. Veeva mascot, Vern, surprised Jen onstage to celebrate the five-year birthday of Veeva Vault. In a short time, Veeva Vault has grown to include a suite of 12 applications to help life sciences with some their most critical functions — from R&D to commercial — to increase business agility, speed time-to-market, and better meet regulatory requirements.

Jen Goldsmith and Vern take a moment to say happy 5th birthday to Veeva Vault with a commemorative selfie.

In 1996, many life sciences companies were implementing their first operational systems, and simple spreadsheets and databases were good enough to run operations. Here we are 20 years later, and what worked then isn’t working now as things have become exponentially more complex with global markets, an increasing number of external partners, and almost 100 health authorities worldwide. Jen pointed out that yesterday’s disparate legacy systems simply couldn’t keep up.

Enter the cloud and the ability to unify and streamline business processes and operations, which has become much more critical. It was this need that drove the creation of Veeva Vault so that organizations could work more efficiently and collaboratively while still maintaining compliance with global regulations. While Veeva Vault initially helped unify individual business areas, what is proving to be even more powerful, according to Jen, is the ability to connect operations across different business areas. The Veeva Vault platform makes it possible to create, unify, and connect capabilities across the enterprise.

CEO and founder, Peter Gassner, also talked about the power of the Veeva Vault platform during his keynote. “We want to run to complexity,” Peter told the audience. This means enabling life sciences to tackle the most difficult challenges with the industry’s most complete platform and suite of applications. “It’s what customers are looking for,” he said. “Such rapid pace of innovation is made possible by the underlying Veeva Vault Platform, which is how we build applications like Vault QMS, Vault CTMS, and now, Vault EDC, so quickly and in a robust way.”

CEO Peter Gassner: Customers want a complete platform and suite of applications.

Veeva Vault EDC, along with Veeva Vault eSource, are the latest applications announced by Veeva. For the first time, customers can have a set of applications for clinical data management on a single cloud platform. Veeva is building upon its track record of innovation and customer success by delivering a modern cloud approach for clinical data management, a strategic area ripe for innovation, as Peter put it. Now life sciences companies will get the high quality data they need, at a faster pace, to accelerate trials. Veeva’s expanded clinical leadership team, will play a key role in delivering continued innovation that will solve customers’ most strategic challenges in clinical.

Press Release: Veeva Announced EDC and eSource to Transform Clinical Data Management
Press release: Veeva Expands Clinical Leadership Team to Accelerate Next Phase of Innovation and Customer Success

Veeva Vault has been a big factor in making our customers successful and enabling speed and quality. We’re proud to partner with so many customers who have contributed significantly to Veeva’s history and product innovation over the years. Every year we recognize the Veeva Heroes that are leading innovation and driving mass transformation in the industry. Their leadership is not only having lasting impacts on clinical, regulatory, and quality processes within their own organizations, but also having a positive ripple effect throughout the entire industry.

Veeva CEO Peter Gassner honors the 2016 Veeva Heroes

In addition to Veeva Heroes, there were many more customer stories throughout the event that demonstrated the power of unified applications. Two of the top 20 global pharma companies shared how Veeva Vault was driving change within their organizations. For these customers, the ability to unify and connect their business processes reduced organizational complexity in regulatory operations and created a collaborative supply chain to work seamlessly with external vendors and suppliers. Other customers such as ICON, inVentiv, and Karyopharm are using Veeva Vault applications to streamline clinical, regulatory, and quality operations.

Press release: Adoption of Veeva Vault Quality Applications Grows as Industry Moves to Unify Processes Across Global Stakeholders
Press release: Veeva Streamlines Regulatory and Quality Operations at ICON
Press release: inVentiv Health Expedites Site Activation with Veeva

As we move forward, Veeva will continue to invest in creating deep, purpose built applications and unified suites across clinical, regulatory, and quality, on top of the strongest content management platform in the industry. Veeva Vault has come a long way in five years, and the next five years promises to be just as innovative and exciting.