Veeva Systems Inc (VEEV) 2015 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon. My name is Chris, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Veeva Systems FY15 third-quarter results conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

Thank you. Rick Lund, Veeva's Investor Relations Director, you may begin your conference.

Thanks Chris. Good afternoon and welcome to Veeva's fiscal third-quarter earnings call. With me on today's call are Peter Gassner, our Chief Executive Officer; Matt Wallach, our President; and Tim Cabral, our Chief Financial Officer.

During the course of this conference call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding trends, our strategies and the anticipated performance of the business. These forward-looking statements will be based on Management's current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. 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 which is available on the Company's website at www.veeva.com under the investors section and on the SEC's website at www.SEC.gov.

Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today, November 25, 2014. If this call is replayed or viewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Veeva disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. We will provide guidance on today's call but 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 will also discuss certain non-GAAP metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation to comparable GAAP metrics can be found in today's earnings release which is available on our website and as an exhibit to the Form 8-K filed with the SEC just before this call.

With that, thank you for joining us, and I will turn it over to Peter.

Thank you Rick. In the third quarter, we had revenue of $83.8 million, up 52% from a year ago. We continued to deliver solid profitability with a non-GAAP operating margin of nearly 29% for the quarter and achieved a number of significant milestones demonstrating our progress in all product lines.

Our goal from the start has been to establish Veeva as one of the most important technology partners to Life Sciences by providing fully integrated industry cloud solutions. We're seeing great progress in this mission with offerings that support the most critical needs across our customers' R&D and commercial operations.

With an expanded set of solutions and a track record of customer success, we are now engaging more broadly and at higher levels with our customers and prospects. This dynamic is driving significant momentum with our existing and newer products and fueling a growing pipeline.

We have an increasingly strong mix of revenue across all areas. CRM has healthy growth, and our newer product lines are now becoming more significant contributors to our business with non-CRM revenues surpassing 15% of total revenue in the quarter. We're seeing great momentum in Veeva Vault, our cloud-based content management solution for Life Sciences.

In October, we hosted the first ever Veeva R&D Summit. With more than 300 attendees, it was the largest content management conference for Life Sciences this year.

We drew leaders from 80 different Life Sciences companies and had a great mix of prospects and customers. More than 20 customers speakers shared why they chose Vault, lessons learned and, most importantly, how Vault is adding value.

It was an outstanding conference. You could feel the excitement around Vault from our customers, our prospects, and our product team. I heard time and time again from customers and prospects that they love our products and our people.

100% of attendees surveyed said they were satisfied or extremely satisfied with the event. 100% said they planned to attend next year. We're building on the momentum from R&D Summit as we work to establish Vault as the de facto standard for content management and Life Sciences over the coming years.

Why are customers so excited about Vault? Today the industry is stuck on a variety of client services systems that are 10 years old to 15 years old. The systems are slow.

It can take minutes to find and retrieve a document, usability is poor, they are highly customized, there's no integrated reporting. As a result, documents are kept inside systems which can cause compliance problems and a real drag on efficiency.

The industry wants cloud solutions to streamline IT. They don't want to manage the overhead of servers, software versions, IP operations and upgrades. They one applications that fit their business.

With Vault, they get a suite of cloud applications they can typically implement in just a few months because the applications are functionally complete. Vault is fast and easy to use. The average document download time is currently less than 1.5 seconds as measured from the end user's browser.

There is integrated reporting. These are applications that fit and deliver significant time to value.

And it's about our people. Our services team and our product team have deep domain expertise and a track record of delivery our customers can trust.

We're seeing outstanding growth with Vault, and it continues to track to a similar growth rate that we saw in the early days of CRM. We now have more than 100 Vault customers.

In the last 12 months, we have seen a threefold increase in the total number of Vaults utilized by Veeva customers. And in the third quarter alone, we signed three Vault deals with annual contract values in the seven figures.

Life Sciences companies large and small as well as CROs are moving to Vault. In Q3, Vault eTMF was selected at the global standard at yet another top 10 Pharma to manage documents for all their clinical trials globally, the third customer from the top 10.

We also had an emerging biotech company sign up for all three R&D applications at the same time, submissions, eTMF and quality docs, a first for our business. Finally inVentiv, a top eight CRO, selected Vault eTMF this past quarter as a companywide standard.

One of the other seven-figure deals -- Vault deals in the quarter was a global enterprise subscription agreement for Vault PromoMats our solution for promotional materials management. This company, a top 10 Pharma, is an existing CRM customer, and our successful relationship we built with them contributed to our selection.

Vault PromoMats will replace a large number of systems across all their commercial divisions and regions around the world. They will now have a single global system in the cloud with the accessibility and flexibility to meet local needs.

We anticipate Vault will significantly decrease time for content approval, increase reuse and save them millions of dollars per year. We are laser focused on making this customer successful. If we deliver, they will be a highly visible reference for Vault.

We have continued growth across the other areas of commercial cloud as well. In CRM, we won a number of new customers and expanded with existing customers. In the quarter, we sold and deployed 5000 users in Asia-Pacific with a top 10 Pharma.

Also in CRM, companies continue the expansion from single channel face-to-face interactions to multi channel CRM. Our emergence as a leader in core CRM is driving this success.

It was a record quarter for Veeva CRM approved email, which included our first enterprise wide win with a large customer who is standardizing on approved email. And we have great interest in our newest CRM applications, events management and Align, that aren't yet generally available.

Both early adopter programs are oversubscribed, and we're now close to new customers. We even received our first order for Veeva CRM events management this quarter though the product will not be generally available until Q2 of calendar 2015.

Veeva Network had a substantial milestone in Q3 as our first top 10 Pharma customer went live in the quarter in the US with our network software and data. This customer is a key reference for other companies considering network.

Because of the tremendous potential in industry-specific data, we have continued to make big investments in the network side of our business. Over the last few years, we have built a highly specialized development team in Toronto that has built a global single instance customer master software solution that is unlike anything that has been available to this industry to date. Now to complement that, we're in the process of expanding the reference data of healthcare professionals, healthcare organizations and affiliations that we intend to make the gold standard for the industry.

To help establish our leadership position in reference data, we recently brought on Tim Slevin as SVP of Global Data Solutions to run our data business worldwide. Tim brings 20 years experience in data with more than half of that serving Life Sciences. Most recently, Tim was the CEO of Healthcare Data Solutions. Tim is one of the very best and brings proven leadership skills, extensive domain expertise and a track record of innovation and customer success to this growing new area for Veeva.

In summary, I'm very pleased with the continued strength of our business. Our industry cloud is driving success for customers, which in turn is fueling the momentum we're seeing across all areas of the business from commercial to R&D.

We continue to expand our strong partnership with the industry as we solve more of our customers' biggest challenges and are well on the path toward becoming the most important and trusted technology partner. With that I will turn it over to Tim.

Thanks Peter. Overall I was pleased with our third-quarter results.

Total revenue was $83.8 million, up from $55 million one year ago, a 52% increase and above our guidance of $78 million to $79 million. For the quarter, subscription revenue was up 58% to $61.4 million from $38.9 million last year. Our subscription revenue base continues to grow at a healthy pace due to strength across all of our product lines. But especially as our customers expand their use of multi channel CRM and as the Vault business gains considerable momentum.

Services revenue for the quarter was $22.4 million, up 40% from $16 million one year ago. The strength in our services business this quarter was driven largely by a dramatic increase in Vault R&D services projects and the achievement of certain project milestones which contributed slightly over $700,000. However, given the timing of the project schedules and lower utilization during the upcoming holiday season, I expect services revenue to be down in Q4 on a sequential basis.

We continue to expect services revenue to be variable period to period depending on a number of factors, including the requirements, complexity and timing of our customers' implementation projects and the achievement of milestones at some of our professional services arrangements. The primary purpose of our professional services business remains to ensure our customers achieve success with our cloud solutions.

In terms of geographic mix for the third quarter, approximately 55% of our total revenue came from North America and 45% came from outside North America. This was a shift of 5 percentage points towards international versus Q3 from a year ago.

In discussing the remainder of the income statement, please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses and operating results are on a non-GAAP basis and are reconciled in the tables from our press release, which is posted on our website and filed with the SEC. Our subscription gross margin was 78%, up 1 percentage point from a year ago, largely driven by the increased contribution of Vault network and CRM multi channel add-ons. We expect the trend in subscription gross margin to be up over time as our newer products account for a growing percentage of subscription revenue.

As discussed previously, these products generally have slightly higher gross margin profile relative to our core CRM products. In Q3, services gross margin was 31% compared to 27% one year ago. We saw significant rise in utilization this quarter associated with increased object activity, especially within Vault R&D.

Our target services gross margin remained in the 20%. However, we may see temporary deviations above that range during periods of unusually high activity as we saw in Q3. Accordingly in Q4, I expect services gross margins to return to this range as utilization rates normalize.

Our total gross margin for Q3 was 65% versus 62% one year ago. This increase was driven by the growth in subscription revenue as a percent of total revenue and by the improvements in subscription and services gross margins.

Turning to operating expense we had an outstanding hiring quarter, adding 72 people net across all functions of the organization. We ended the quarter with 887 employees compared to 663 a year ago. This growth in headcount was a primary driver behind the 37% growth in overall operating expenses from the same period last year.

Sales and marketing expense was $13.5 million versus $10.9 million last year. R&D expense came in at $9.8 million, up from $6.8 million one year ago, and G&A expense was $7.3 million compared to $4.7 million in Q3 of last year. We expect to continue hiring aggressively across the organization in the foreseeable future as we look to drive further success for our customers and long-term growth for our company.

Our operating margin was 28.7% in the third quarter, up from 21.6% in the prior year period. The operating margin improvement was driven by an increasing gross margin and by the outperformance on our top line.

As you will see from the guidance that I'm about to provide, we expect the operating margin to be down sequentially in Q4 due to the impact of the hiring that we completed in this quarter, further expected hires in Q4 and lower services gross margin. Net income was $13.7 million compared to $7.7 million last year.

Our tax rate was up slightly on a sequential basis largely due to FX and other equity compensation related items. Absent reinstatement of the R&D tax credit or other large moves in foreign exchange rates, you should expect a roughly 40% effective tax rate on a non-GAAP basis going forward. Our fully diluted net income per share for the quarter was $0.09 based on net income attributable to common stockholders of $13.6 million and diluted weighted average share count of $144.3 million.

Before moving to the balance sheet, I'd like to spend a few minutes on FX. We report revenue by geography based on the location of the end-user. However, our billings are based on location of the entity purchasing the solution and services.

Thus in a typical quarter, over 80% of our billings are in US dollars, about 10% in euros, and the rest is a mix of yen, Chinese RMB and other currencies. When there are significant movements in exchange rates, the impact on our top line revenue will be realized gradually as our customers are billed at different times during the next year. In Q3, FX impacted our deferred revenue by about $400,000 and therefore had an immaterial effect on revenue in the quarter.

Looking forward, I am anticipating a negative impact on revenue of roughly $700,000 to $800,000 to Q4 and a total to $3 million to $4 million over the course of FY16 based on current exchange rates. In addition, the realized and unrealized effects of changes in exchange rates in Q3 appear in the other income line of our income statement and amounted to a loss of $1.3 million in the quarter.

Turning to the balance sheet, deferred revenue was $84.7 million, slightly down on the sequential basis from $85.3 million in Q2. Our calculated billings were up 38% on a year-over-year basis and were down slightly from the previous quarter as indicated on our last earnings call.

As you consider calculated billings for the quarter, there are a few things to note. First, the accelerated CRM deployment that we saw in Q2 pulled ahead some of the billings that were expected in Q3. Second within our renewal base, Q3 sees fewer renewal billings than Q2 or Q4, and finally, FX headwinds affected our billings number by $400,000.

As a reminder, our calculated billings metric is impacted by many factors including the timing and duration of orders, payment terms, seasonality within our renewal base and movements in foreign currencies. Therefore, this metric is not necessarily indicative of the overall health of our business in any given period.

We exited the quarter with $393 million in cash and short-term investments, up from $350 million at the end of Q2. Cash flow from operations came in at $34.3 million, up from $5.3 million one year ago. This performance in Q3 was driven largely by strong bottom-line performance and an outstanding quarter of collections.

Before I turn to the guidance I wanted to quickly shared that our ongoing patent litigation was recently settled. The settlement amount is confidential but was included in the results reported today and will have an immaterial impact to our financials going forward.

Let me wrap up by sharing our outlook for Q4. For the fourth quarter, we expect revenue between $84.5 million and $85.5 million, non-GAAP operating income of $22 million to $23 million and non-GAAP net income per share of $0.08 to $0.09 based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 145.5 million.

For the full-year 2015, this guidance for Q4 implies revenue of $310.7 million to $311.7 million. Non-GAAP operating income of $83.1 million to $84.1 million, which implies a non-GAAP operating margin that is approximately 26.9% at the midpoint of the range. And non-GAAP net income per share of $0.33 to $0.34 based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 144.5 million. When we report our fourth-quarter results on our next earnings call, we plan to provide guidance for our fiscal year ending January 2016.

Overall I'm quite happy with the momentum of the business and the results from the quarter. Our focus on customer success is fueling growth across all product lines, and we're continuing to invest for future growth. With that thank you for joining the call today, and I will turn it back to the operator for questions.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions)

Jennifer Lowe, Morgan Stanley.

Great thank you. Maybe I will start with, it was encouraging to hear all the positive data points around Vault momentum, so I had a couple questions following up on that.

First to the extent that you have seen over 100 Vault customers at this point, do you have a feel for how many of those are outside of your traditional CRM base versus upsales and customers you had been working with already? And secondly related to that, to the extent you are building out sales force capacity to go after some new customers with Vault that you weren't able to sell into a CRM, how is that process ramped, and where are you in that investment cycle?

Sure, this is Matt Wallach. Hi Jen. In terms of the customer base for Vault, about half of those companies have both Vault and CRM. And so we've been very effective in selling into the current CRM install base, but we've also been effective selling outside of it. And in terms of what that took, so remember Vault is a commercial Vault application for promotion materials and medical content, and then there are three applications on the R&D side.

We leverage the commercial sales team to sell the commercial Vault applications, so that's a lot of the overlap. On the R&D side, that's where we added the significant new headcount in the sales force both in the US and outside the US, although it continues to grow outside the US.

Great. Thank you, and maybe just one last one since you touched on some of the opportunities outside the US. I think maybe a year ago you talked about adding your first salesperson in Brazil and expanding internationally was something that you were focused on? Can you just give us an update in terms of your sales footprint outside of the US, where that stands currently?

Yes, we're making good progress in Latin America which we started towards the end of last year. And we're starting to see some early wins there. We see similar momentum there as we saw with our other regions that we opened up over the years, Asia-Pacific and before that China and Japan and Europe.

It starts with supporting our global customers, supporting them in the region and selling add on regional to our global customers, and then it continues with selling to the domestic companies in the region. And particular to Brazil, we recorded our first win with the local Brazilian company, and we expect more of those in the future. So it's good progress in Latin America.

Great. Thank you.

Tom Roderick, Stifel.

I wanted to build off Jen's question on the Vault side of the business. Curious if you're seeing customers who maybe a year ago or even more had taken on PromoMat that are now switching over and adopting eTMF. And as it relates to the Vault side, do you see different decision-makers within those two areas as crossover, how does that when one customer's adopting both sides of the Vault equation? Thank.

Sure Tom, this is Matt. So you know we've been selling the PromoMats application for about three years, eTMF for about half of that. And we definitely have seen some companies start on the commercial side with Vault, with the PromoMats application and then expand onto the R&D side. Although I would say that the majority of our eTMF customers did not start that way.

So we are seeing it but it's not actually the majority. The majority of eTMF customers are companies that were buying their first Vault with eTMF.

Now that being said we see a lot of expansion across customers. We talked about the one company that bought all three Vaults, and we have some companies that have even more than that. But the average number of Vaults per customers is around 1 1/2, so we actually have as many companies with more than one Vault as we have that are still on their first. So we see that expansion.

And in terms of the decision-makers, they are very different with large companies on the commercial side versus the R&D side. Within smaller companies, we can see some overlap in decision-makers particularly within IT, but the Vault decisions are generally more business focused and IT focused, and we have different decision-makers that are driving those decisions for each of the Vault applications.

Okay. Second question from me, slightly different topic with the SI community, but the partner committee for assistance integration, can you give us an update of how its progressing and how they are building themselves around as the CRM product line and Vault here which is still on the emerging front. Interesting to see the services business tick back up, seems to be tied to Vault, but how is the community looking at both sides of the business between CRM and Vault? Thanks.

So our overall strategy for working with SIs is the same across the product lines. It maybe it wasn't so obvious on the CRM side because we weren't talking on calls like this in the beginning. But we did a lot of the early implementation ourselves when the product was new, when we were developing patterns and best practices.

And then the SI community took more and more of its services business over time. So we see the same thing happening within Vault and network where we are still relatively early.

And so we're still doing a larger percentage of the services work involved in network today than we are in CRM today, but the normal trend has already started with multiple partners going through Vault training partners starting to go through network training. I think the strategy is the same and we're seeing the same patterns emerge as these products grow.

Thanks guys. Nice job.

Richard Davis, Canaccord.

Thanks. I actually got this question today from an investor. There were about 100 biotech IPOs this year, so which products and maybe it's R&D Vault or whatever, would be relevant opportunities for you guys to sell to these newly minted companies, and what's the matriculation pace and the opportunities today, are they opportunities by scale on the larger side? And I have a quick follow-up. Thanks.

So this is Matt again. in terms, if I can oversimplified those 100 IPOs, companies will either raise money to go into serious clinical trial, so late phase 2 or going into phase 3 trials, or they will raise money as they are getting ready to commercialize. And then the answer would be different for both.

As you see companies getting successful with their molecules under development that they are going to start major clinical trials, it is the R&D Vault that is most relevant for them. Sometimes they would start with the eTMF, but sometimes they would also start with the quality docs application so they can get the SOP management under control around the company. And then as they get out of Phase II and into Phase III, the submissions Vault becomes more important.

So the early stage IPOs it's clearly commercial -- the R&D Vault. But when they start to commercialize, then it's the full commercial cloud as well. So by the time a company is getting ready to launch their first product, they are actually a potential customer of every product that Veeva sells today.

Got it, no matter what it does. It's a positive for you guys I would think.

It is a positive Richard, but we also have a lot of privately owned customers as well. So yes it's a point, but I can remember a few cases where company said -- okay, we just got our funding, now we can go forward with the project.

But these are enterprise systems. You can't run the company without some of the systems. And so it doesn't feel like sales of Vault are tied to major financing events generally.

Got it. When I think about event driven management and Align they are slightly different use cases at least in your core FFA CRM stuff.

How should we think about maybe you can talk about this but pricing on these modules, is it going to be more directly tied? I don't think to an individual salesperson, so how should we think about pricing at least at a high level?

So take Align first, that is more like the way we priced other things per user per month. And Align is very closely tied to the number of territories and the number of territories is very closely aligned to the number of sales reps. So as we've talked about Align and our other CRM add-ons being something in the range of 15% to 25% of the base charge, it will be in that range, and that's how we think about it.

The event management app you are right, that one is different, and that one is not at all tied to the number of sales reps. That is tied to the number of events.

So you had some very large companies because of their therapeutic mix might not run that many events compared to a company that may have 100 reps but does thousands of events because they are very medical are marketing focused. So the event management not tied to the sales reps, that one is tied to the number of events the company's run worldwide.

Got it, that makes sense. Thanks very much.

Karl Keirstead, Deutsche Bank.

Thank you, a couple questions for Tim. Tim, we haven't seen a sequential decline in DR from Veeva before, so I want to focus my first question here.

It's downs like it was due primarily to the accelerated deployments in 2Q, so I guess I have a two-part question. One is, is there any way for you to quantify what the pull forward was to enable us to calculate a normalized billings growth rate for your third quarter? And secondly is that phenomenon largely behind you now such that in the fourth quarter, we might return to quote normal seasonality? Thanks.

Yeah Karl, thanks for the question. In terms of quantifying the size of the pull forward in Q2, we don't want to do that at this point, but what I would say is its exceptional, and we talked about pull forward of business before. Q2 was of an exceptional nature and was material from that perspective, and that as you heard in my prepared remarks had an impact on the sequential comparison of the deferred revenue and therefore calculated billings between the two quarters.

In terms of whether that's behind, let me generalize it a little bit more. As we are selling into large enterprise companies and you heard us talk about this a little bit, there is some lumpiness to that business. There will be some large deals and potentially deals that get pulled forward or pushed out depending on our customers' implementation cycle and really their strategy and priorities for the business.

So I wouldn't say specifically that it's that phenomenon is behind us from that perspective. Specific to Q4, we don't see anything that would impact Q4 billings in that way calculated billings or deferred revenues in that way, Karl.

Okay great, if I can ask my follow up again to you, Tim, and this is more in the operating margins. For this fiscal year, your margin performance has been extraordinary. And it looks like you are now guiding for the full year for something close to 27% up from 22.5% last year. So I don't think on this call you're going to give guidance for FY16, but given the extraordinary performance in our efforts to model the operating margin line for FY16, maybe you could touch a little bit of what some of the investment priorities are that might impact that figure.

Karl this is Peter, I can take that one. In terms of investment priorities, it's really across the board. As we gain more customers we have more momentum involved. We have new products going on.

We will really invest in these areas. Products across the board, CRM Vault and network, services capacity and that's a global effort sales capacity. And G&A is our business grows.

So I don't see a particular step function which we had or let's say more than a year ago when we were building our R&D sales force, so I don't expect that. But I expect a consistent investment across the board, and that as Jim mentioned will probably bring down our operating margin slightly. But we're really focused on the long-term momentum, and next year we have to invest to ensure that growth.

Got it. Okay. Thanks for the color.

Brendan Barnicle, Pacific Crest Securities.

Thanks so much. I want to follow up a bit on Richard's question. Like the IPOs you seen in the space, there also continues to be ongoing consolidation.

Any impact that consolidation is having? You talked about it before but any changes there?

Hey Brendan, this is Matt. No real changes. We haven't seen the industry consolidation driving big reduction in the sales force size as most of the acquisitions have been in complementary therapeutic areas.

So you take an example of activists. Activist is a combination of Watson, this Warner Chilcott and recently to Rodda therapeutics. Those are basically all complementary deals, so the size of that sales force is roughly the size of all of those combined.

And then if activist does close the deal that was just announced, that's largely complementary as well. I think activist may have small dermatology sales force, but the sales forces more highly specialized.

So we just haven't seen the consolidation changing the market dynamics change in the size of the market. It's been a normal part of the industry since we started the company, and it continues to be either neutral or even positive for Veeva.

Terrific, and then Matt, we've seen more and more companies that have fully depreciated their legacy systems like their CBO and acumen systems. Is that having any impact on business and demand?

Yeah I think that's been a big driver from the beginning. The advantage we have now is that it's across multiple product lines. So we used to be dependent on how quickly could you depreciate the old CBO or stuff, but now includes the old document stuff, the old stop and the MDM space.

And so that's the constant demand is as companies get to the end up life of the installed software that they are on, they have a decision to either go through a very expensive upgrade where they may or may not get a whole lot of business benefit or to look around for a new solution and in our case a cloud-based one. So that continues to be a driver of growth and demand across the industry and across our product lines.

And Brendan, I would say just to add onto that particularly in Vault, one of the things that's going on. I wouldn't say it's primarily the depreciation driven. I think the momentum is caused by this is the first major technology innovation and content management for Life Sciences really that's happened in the last 10 or 15 years.

So that's causing the momentum, the R&D customer summit, we had about 300 people there. We have some significant customers live in they are sharing business benefits of that with prospects and other customers.

So I think more than anything it's the technology innovation that's really driving our growth. I think we also saw this with CRM in that area.

It was moving to cloud-based systems and iPad off of client/server and older hardware. And in Vault, it's really about these cloud based Systems the really first major innovation they have had. So I think that is what's driving it.

Great, thanks Peter.

Sterling Auty, JPMorgan. I'm sorry, just one moment. I'm having a technical difficulty on my end. My apologies Mr. Auty, your line is open.

Hi guys. Tim I missed if you got into any details about looking at the sales and marketing.

I think there was some discussion about hiring across the board, but specifically wondering if you can give us a little bit of color about the leverage you have in the sales and marketing in the quarter. Were there any expenses on the commission side that also got pulled forward into the second quarter or anything else that might describe the leverage you got on that line item this quarter?

I don't think there was any unusual leverage sterling on the sales and marketing line item this quarter relative to any other quarter. I think in terms of the percent which I'm imagining that's what you are asking, I think one of the things that impacted that is a percent of total revenue was the services revenue outperformance, which really at some level moves fairly independently of our sales and marketing line item.

I won't say fully independently, but somewhat independently Sterling, but to answer your question specifically there was no leverage point in the particular quarter's performance. Beyond the general leverage in the model itself which we have talked about before.

Okay maybe the better way I should have asked it is when you look at sales and marketing level in the quarter, would you say this was in line with your expectation a little above or a little below?

I would say that given the revenue outperformance, it was a little bit below. And I think you will see that in quarters when there is that level of revenue outperformance that our percent of operating expenses will be a little bit lower than what we had internally expected.

I guess I was looking more from a dollar terms than a percentage term.

We don't quantify at that level of detail Sterling.

Okay, and last quick one, really big collections quarter. Anything in particular is that just coincide with hitting the milestones on the services side?

Well I don't like to call out individuals within this call but we did recently actually hire a person onto our collections team that has really done a phenomenal job of spearheading collections. And Sterling, as you can imagine, collections is a discipline of persistence and consistency, and I think this person and as a buildout his team a little bit, they have driven that level of focus and persistence. I think that has been a part of the improved performance in that area.

Got it. Thank you.

Jason Maynard, Wells Fargo.

Hey good afternoon guys. I had a couple questions. So the first thing I wanted to get a little bit of color on is the operating margin outperformance which you have been showing is great for obviously near-term cash flow. But if I look out to next year and I think about your productive sales capacity or your ability to drive upsells and cross-sells of some of the new products, it does make me ask the question where do you stand relative to your original hiring plan?

Are you above or behind plan? And just how do you think about operating margins at this level in context of what looks like obviously a multibillion-dollar growth opportunity? Thank you.

Yeah Jason, this is Tim, thanks for the question. So as we look at the last couple of quarters, I think there's been some themes that have been similar in terms of what has driven our bottom-line performance. The revenue outperformance being higher than we had expected is one of the key drivers, and as you can imagine, that revenue is heading our books faster than the expenses that are heading our books from hiring or making investments.

We also saw in Q3 the professional services revenue, and that business really drove a great performance from the higher utilization rate. As we look forward and we haven't provided any specific guidance for the future for operating margin specifically FY16, but we do plan to continue to invest as Peter talked about earlier across all the areas for long-term growth and customer success.

So overall I would say these last two quarters have been higher than we expected as revenue has outpaced our bending if you will. In terms of your specific question around our headcount plans, we are performing nicely against an aggressive hiring plan, and we're comfortable in how we're doing that and we will continue to invest aggressively through hiring for the opportunity in front of us.

And maybe as a follow-up just in terms of drilling into the network product area, you actually have made a few recent additions. And I'm curious just to get a sense as you think about that opportunity, is that become more of a mainstream adoption play by your customers next year? Do you need more sales capacity on your end to drive it, or is it a question of customer maturation a willingness to adopt it as in the gating factor of growth. Thanks.

I would say network -- network is a product of data and it's also software. So especially the data product is going to vary by region. It's majority and whether it's out of the early adopter phase.

Overall network is just a couple years old so it certainly in the early adopter phase, and I would say that's its gating factor now we need to get more customers live. We need to get more data assets in more regions until it hits mainstream.

Now as far as having sales capacity, largely we do have the sales capacity for network, and we will sell that out of our operation that sells into the commercial side of Life Sciences. But we will have to add incremental capacity as we go along specifically to support the data sales area of network. And that's going to require actually more sales consulting type of resources and data consulting type of resources than it would be your classic sales rep.

So I would say incremental investment and network is showing a similar pattern as CMM and Vault did in you have to get the product mature, take some time, got to get your early adopters live and happy, that take some time. And then you just move from there. So we're really pleased with that but it's early days with network.

Great. Awesome. Thank you.

Bhavan Suri.

Hey guys can you hear me okay?

Yes we can.

Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to focus a little bit on the CRO space which is great you had some wins there. When you look in that space and you look at the deal that was recently announced and you look at your traction in the CRO space, any trend whether it's early stage for late stage given that data suggests that the early stage CRO is not doing that well?

So as you know contract research organization or CROs are really key players in clinical trials. But I haven't seen what you just referred to in your question that it's slowing down because we actually see all these companies continuing to grow.

So saving that debate, the CROs are important, whether they are growing incrementally or shrinking incrementally, they are doing almost half of the clinical trials on behalf of the Life Sciences industry. So for us is a big important segment. We have about a dozen CRO customers today, and each time a CRO chooses Vault, it's extra important because the reason the CROs exist is to be able to run these trials more efficiently, more cheaply and more quickly than the companies can do themselves.

So when they make a technology choice, that contributes to their competitive advantage. And then word gets around quickly because whenever they are pitching for new business, they are talking about the technology choices that they may. So it's an important category for us or is an important type of company, and the partnership with inVentiv as the first of the top eight CROs to use our clinical product will prove significant over time.

Okay, and quick follow up because, and again, just focusing on that deal, obviously with touching the fact that can get real-time patient data. And as you look at future product potential areas, how do you think you play into that ability to provide value as you look at more real-time patient data to drive better enhancement in the file area? Is there a play there or am I stretching?

Well so there are clearly plays here. LabCorp saw metadata talks about patient level data and they have just done a couple of studies with Pharma companies.

I think it's early for us given the maturity of our clinical business to get into the specific patient level data, but we think about it not only on the clinical side but we also think about it on the commercial side. And so it's an area that there is no single clear market leader, and so I think it's still up for grabs who the leaders will be in patient data and the application of that for real-world decision-making.

All right guys, that was helpful and thanks for taking my question.

Sure.

That concludes the question-and-answer portion of today's call. I will now turn it back to Mr. Gassner for closing remarks.

Thank you and thank you all for attending and for your questions. We're really pleased with our results this quarter.

I want to take a minute to call out our employees for their great efforts in the quarter and for their dedication to customer success. Also to our customers for their partnership along the way.

We are excited about the future as we build this industry cloud. It's going to be an exciting road ahead, and I look forward to seeing you on the next quarterly call. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.