Veeva Systems, which has filed to go public, is an incredible example of what an Industry Cloud provider can achieve in a short time period with focus and use of the latest technology.

As Veeva notes in their prospectus:

“We founded our company in 2007 on the premise that industry-specific business problems would best be addressed by industry-specific, cloud-based solutions, an approach referred to as Industry Cloud.”

Here’s what is astounding about the company:

• Founded in 2007, yet had $130 million in revenue for the year ended 1/31/13.  Veeva is on track for almost $200 million in revenue this fiscal year.
• Already profitable ($18 million in net income for the YE 1/31/2013).  Note this horizontal cloud providers!
• Already 35% of sales are international.
• R&D and marketing expenditures already under control as a % or revenue.
• Unabashedly multi-tenant in a highly regulated industry.
• Built on the Salesforce platform.

Veeva is doing in a vertical industry what Workday and Salesforce are doing horizontally. They are taking on the legacy systems, especially Oracle, in Pharma and Life Sciences. Veeva’s main solution, from which they derive 95% of their revenue, is an industry-specific CRM that tracks regulated issues like the samples provided to docs and is much more mobile friendly than legacy systems.  Now Veeva is adding other modules to try to get into the pharma companies’ R&D budgets and even a Data.com-like offering to build a shared contact database in life sciences. If they are successful in this latter offering, they will have a true network effect.

Any legacy, industry-specific provider of software should be aware of the Veeva story and be prepared to respond to a similar “new wave” competitor. Industry-specific cloud solutions can achieve speed–and speed kills.