Veeva Systems (VEEV +0.10%) is no longer just a healthcare company. The leading provider of cloud-based software solutions to the life-sciences industry now has its sights set on the quality management space.
In this clip from Industry Focus: Healthcare, co-founder and president Matt Wallach explains the two approaches companies choose between when building software -- and how his company plans to differentiate itself in its new market by choosing both.
A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on March 15, 2017.
Kristine Harjes: It seems like you put a lot of thought into choosing the first non-life-sciences market that you wanted to enter. What is the competitive landscape within that market?
Matt Wallach: That competitive landscape actually reminds me a bit of what we've seen in life sciences. There's a large number of companies. None of them are huge. I think it's probably 100- to 400-person companies, and a bunch of them. They have specialization either on the content management side or the data management side. And they also have specialization from industry to industry, although many of them try to target the same industries that we're going after. It's mostly small companies that I would say try to have a best-of-breed type approach.
With software companies, there's really two main approaches to building products. Either you want to be a best-of-breed company, you do one thing really well, you try to do it better than everyone else, but when a customer wants to integrate that with other things, they have to write that code themselves. Or you have integrated suites of products, and some of the integrated suite vendors take advantage of the fact that it's an integrated suite. So when they build something new, they make it just good enough that everyone's going to buy it, because they know you're going to buy it anyway because it's part of the suite. What Veeva does that is unique is we talk about unified and best-of-breed products. So yes, we have a unified suite, all of these applications on Vault. And as we build more and more applications, they're all going to be on the exact same platform. But we also make a commitment to our customers that if we go into an area, we're committing to build a best-of-breed product. We're not going to stop until we have the very best product available. And then, our products get better three times a year, working with customers forever. So we're going after, in life sciences today, with a unified suite of best-of-breed products, and we will use that same strategy outside life sciences to try and counter what we think is going to be a competitive set of a bunch of legacy best-of-breed applications.
