Veeva Systems (VEEV) Q2 2027 earnings call transcript

I will now hand the conference over to Gunnar Hanson, Senior Director, Investor Relations. Gunnar, please go ahead. Good afternoon and welcome to Viva's Fiscal 2027 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call for the quarter end of July 31st, 2026. As a reminder, we posted prepared remarks on Viva's Investor Relations website just after 1 p. m. Pacific today. We hope you have had a chance to read them before the call. Today's call will be used primarily for Q&A, but me today for Q&A or Peter Gassner, our Chief Executive Officer, Paul Shalla, EVP Strategy, and Brian Van Wagner, our Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we may make four looking statements regarding trends or strategies and the anticipated performance of the business, including guidance regarding future financial results.

These four looking statements will be used based on our current views and expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially. Please refer to the risk listed in our earnings release and the risk factors included in our most recent filing on Form 10Q. Four looking statements made during the call are being made as of today, August 26th, 2026, based on the facts available to us today. If this call is replayed or reviewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Viva disclaims any We may discuss guidance on today's call, but we will not provide any further guidance or updates on the performance during the quarter unless we do so in the public form.

On the call, we may also discuss certain non-gap metrics that we believe aid in the understanding of our financial results. A reconciliation to comparable gap metrics can be found in today's earnings release and in the supplemental investor presentations, both of which are available on our website.

With that, thank you for joining us and I'll turn the call over to Peter.

Thank you, Gunner, and welcome everyone to the call. Q2 was another strong quarter, delivering the results ahead of our guides. Total revenue in the quarter was 928 million with non-gap operating income of 416 million. Execution was exceptional as quarter as we made strong progress in many key areas. It was our best CRM quarter ever. We also are accelerating rapidly in AI overall and especially with Viva Falcon.

And our focus acquisition strategy is working bringing great people and capabilities to Viva. It's an exciting time. AI is enabling the next big chapter for Viva and the industry. We'll now open up the call to your questions.

I'll take that one. Yeah, there are a lot of things going on, right? The funding environment is relatively good. There's a lot of changes with AI and sciences moving ahead so there's a lot of priorities for the customers. When that happens, they can't do all things at once and they generally try to pick some things that they can do and that are high priority. Your question was related to Falcon.

I think Falcon has a lot of interest right now because it's very clear that that's high priority. Quick cost savings and compliance and efficiency. That's fine on everybody's priority. I think there's a lot of interest in Falcon. We're the rate limiter right now. We have to get that product ready, start working with the early adopters, but interest in Falcon is very high.

Yes, that is a major change for Viva. So Falcon is a Gentic labor. That's something different than we've done before. We've done cloud software, data consulting. Now we have this fourth thing, a Gentic labor. It is transforming the discussion. There's two different things you could do with Viva. You can do some a Gentic labor. You can do core applications. That was never the case before.

The important point is Viva, it fits very well. It's a structural advantage for Viva to both have the a Gentic labor across multiple areas in life sciences and have the core applications across multiple of those areas in life sciences. So that's why I feel like we're very well positioned and the conversations are very rich. Gosh, I just hope we got to get that product going as soon as we can. If we had our early adopters live and successful right now, I don't want it to be hyperbole, but Falcon would be flying off the shelf if that was the case. Because one thing to know is there's not an extensive Falcon implementation.

There's not a data mapping from one system to the other. There's not a cutover process. There's not ETL to do. So this implementation, the full value is faster with Falcon, but the tech underneath it is newer and we have to get our motion down there. If you can tell, I hope you can tell. I'm pretty excited about Falcon. I really think we're on to something.

Yeah. Hey, Brian, this is Brian. I'll take that one. Commercial subs, yeah, very strong quarter. I think the culmination of many quarters of execution, but you see them showing up in the results here. Up about 13% year over year, even when we back out cross six, it's double digits in the rest of commercial. So it's quite a broad base strength in the commercial offering across CRM, content, data, cross six, Austro, most recently, but it was very good about the execution. Cross six continues to be a strong performer with a lot of headroom for growth. We're continuing to see growth in CRM, which I think a lot of the conversation has been is that going to go down?

It's actually going up and we're continuing to see a lot of room to continue growing in a healthy market and cross six, as well as the other areas.

Thanks, guys. Aspen, I think it's very early, but that's the thing to know. This is a startup inside of the event. It's moving very rapidly. It's on 90-day plans. We have a core market that we're going after, the horizontal CRM, and in a new way, in a new way that really enables AI and is built on modern technology.

I think to know that it is very agile now. We're focused on getting the product right, working with our early adopter customers. I'm 100% convinced that there's a market for what we're making in Aspen. Can we execute well enough? That's always the hard thing in a startup. Can you do it? Can you do it better than your competition? What kind of luck do you have along the way that plays into it? I've done the startup thing before starting Viva. I've done the startup thing when we started vault inside of Viva. We're doing it again, and I have lots of friends that have done it, and it's just like that. Can you execute well? Really, really well, and what kind of luck do you have on the way?

But sometimes you're wondering whether the market is there or not. You could say maybe we were wondering that when we were getting new markets going 18 months ago, etc. Right now, we have enough product, and we're working with some early customers. We're 100% clear that the market is there. 100% clear. It's just whether we can execute them, and we'll see. So your question was about how to size the investment as well. It's not very small on the Viva scale. It's not something that Brian or CFO notices really on the Viva scale, because you have to keep that very small when you're working with early customers, and you're iterating an early product. Actually, these days you keep it smaller than normal, because the base of the development is faster with AI.

You actually need a smaller amount of developers, very, very skilled as well. So it's not a financial drain on the company. It's not a focus drain, and it's certainly not any kind of revenue that's figured into our plants at this time.

Any help in helping us think through that? Ken, great question. Now, I'll be able to tell you this definitively now in a couple of years when we're selling lots of Falcon I'll be able to give you the readout. So I'm going to gauge into the future and tell you what we know so far. First off, it's actually going to be an easier selling cycle because IT is really not involved in the genetic waiver. That's not something they're involved in because it's not like that. If you're selling a solution to safety, this is about the budget of the safety team. So it's really the head of the unit, the business unit, and the head of the sort of the operations of that business unit.

So that's super clear. And the other question is, yes, it is a very related buyer. This is actually, we have not hit the case for Falcon where we're selling into a buyer that we are not selling into because we're always selling into the business side with our business applications. Now, sometimes more or less. For example, in the areas of Falcon, where Falcon is playing, for example, safety, clinical regulatory, that's always been somewhat more of a business cell. IT involved, but somewhat more of a business cell. TRM is the most IT heavy cell that we have in general.

So these areas where we're doing Falcon, they were ready, I would say, on the average, 60% of business cell, and those are those are people that we've been selling into for 10 years.

As Peter talked about, Ken, we're very excited about Falcon and the path that it can be on, but you've also seen us over time consistently think about both growth and profitability. And so it's not different entering a new market like Falcon, maybe the dynamics of the market are very slightly different, but it's the same overall approach that we're taking there. And so we scale investment as we scale revenue. There's certainly nothing material that I would call out for this fiscal year. It's all factored into the guidance that we've updated for FY27. And as we get, you know, another couple quarters ahead and engaged into the future of next year, we'll factor that into our guidance for next year.

Peter, maybe my first for you. For the customers that are planning to transition to Salesforce away from VIVA CRM, what do you hear from those customers? What are they saying right now about the decision? And do you think in a longer term, it could be possible for VIVA to win some of those back? Yeah, Ryan, I do. There's a handful of customers, large customers that did select Salesforce, many of them, even two years ago, those projects are having troubles, right? They're not going smoother than we have some project delays because it turns out you, the product is very deep and you need that. So, yeah, I think we can win back some of those customers, maybe some of them completely, other others of them in some certain regions, and not others.

Mike, in the bulk of that win back would probably be in 2027 and 2028 because VIVA CRM, they have that backstop until the end of 2029. So, this is the time when it starts really to get real, right? Because during 2029, there's no more backstop of, oh, we can keep using VIVA CRM because they know they have to go to VIVA CRM. Yeah, we're very optimistic about that and the best thing we can do there to help that is really focus on our existing customers that did decide to go with us for CRM and make them very successful and improve the product. And for the customers that didn't choose VIVA, we have a good relationship with them and they've told us that, hey, we said, hey, we want to be your plan B and they really embrace that and that's the way they view that, because these customers, they have businesses to run, right?

They got to get their medicines to patients. It's great. They love having a backup option if their plan A doesn't work out.

And just as we think about that revenue mix shift and how it's unfolding. Yeah, it's a great question, Ryan, because we're right in the middle of that transition that you pointed to. And I think very pleased with the progress and the execution that we're making, but the old guard that you're referring to would be things like, I guess, EPMF and CTMS and QDocs and QMS and our regulatory suite, that have fueled a lot of the growth in R&D to date. And a lot of the growth as you look out, you know, over the next few years to 2030 and beyond, is being driven by a different set of products, EDC, COA, or TSM, safety, limbs.

And these are big, very strategic products with a ton of headroom, but they're very early. So we're excited about that. We're executing really well against that. But there's a little bit of a, you know, a changing of the guards that's happening there. And the S-curves don't stack up exactly. So you see some of that factored into the guy and it's for the balance of the year. But we're very confident and excited about the long-term trajectory of the R&D business. And obviously, pleased to be raising the guide again here in Q2.

Peter, I was talking about the key readiness gates. You must clear and how do you expect the human and the loop requirement to evolve by workflow types?

The key sort of regulatory hurdles, if I heard correctly. Yeah. You know, agentic labor is like human labor in a way. It's non-deterministic. So you have to prove that you have the right training and guardrails around humans. And that's the same thing we have to do around our agents. And the human, we provide for the human and the loop, what's open as well, because you can see the outcome of what the agent did and does inside of the vault application. So what we can see is it's working very well. It's not this approach is completely similar to what customers are doing today on certain internal projects. The difference is they would like to be able to do it at scale and a very repeatable motion.

So you know, I would guess three years ago, we would probably have to be teaching the customers a lot about what is AI? What is agentic labor? How do you do this? How do you do that? That's, we really don't have to do that so much anymore. The customers know how to deal with it. They just want some partners that can scale it across multiple areas.

So we don't position data clouds as a prerequisite for AI. It's more of an accelerator. The clean in your data is the better your AI processes are going to work, especially in certain areas. You know, what's working well for us in data cloud is open data. So clean reference data. Now that's a hard project to do because it involves changing a lot of things in downstream systems. But we have some momentum there and I think that's going to continue. We have strong momentum encompassed for certain therapeutic areas of complex therapies, where our compass products can see different things in the flow of complex products in the US that other people other offerings can't see. And then we have real market leadership with our link product and link key people.

And we're expanding there with the add-on products of links. So link medical insights, link key accounts for the US, link workflow for congresses. So overall data is not a thing that can accelerate very, very fast. It's not like, you know, selling fast fashion on Instagram, right? That can accelerate fast and then disappear. Data is not like that. It's a long, slow grind.

But we're certainly happy with our progress. And it's very synergistic with Eva. If you look at what Eva, why is Eva being successful? We have a very synergistic product plant. We have software applications that work with our data and consulting that knows about our software and data. And we have agents that work with our applications that are known by our consulting and that leverage our data. So it's not a random set of products. We're building the industry cloud and the more more our customers realize it, the more benefits they get because things fit together.

Our early adopters are with sponsors. Now we have had some interest with service providers. And I say that carefully interest. They're interested, but we really haven't engaged heavily there yet because you have to be focused when you start working with your first customers. Service providers will have similar needs to sponsors, but not the same. So we're focusing on the sponsors first and I fully expect over time that this will be useful for outsource service providers. But we have to work on the sponsors first.

Yeah, China is certainly moving fast. I mean, you know, when we look at my track career standing, oh, you know, it's over 30 years here. It's just, you know, astounding the transformation in China and what it means for the global economy and what can be accomplished and the whole notion of a parallel tech stack in China. So yes, it's, it's, it's moved so fast and it continues. And it's great to see that from my perspective that brings variety. So our opportunities there, we have quite a few products that are made by our Viva China team in China for China.

So we have our China CRM suite and that's gaining market share that's written on the China tech stack, et cetera. We have our data products made in China specific for the China market. And there's other things that we can do in China there in China for China. But one of the big, you know, benefits is those products fit with our global products. For example, China CRM fits with our global problem products. So there's a synergy there. China's good business for us and we're proud to do that in China and it's profitable for us there and it's growing. But it's also synergistic with our global business because our global customers, when they have their headquarters in the US or Japan or, or Europe, they, they want a team, a global Viva team that can help them with China also.

So it's very synergistic. We're, we really love our China business.

And you're talking about charging per human or per agent. Can you walk us through, you know, how you see that pricing model starting, how, you know, the puts and takes of that and what lessons or learnings can kind of be picked up from that as you see more falcon adoption, more AI adoption within the broader Viva suite and, you know, trying to kind of price accordingly for this new AI world. And then I've got a quick follow up. Yeah. So class software, you know, we've got to remember it hasn't been around for 50 years, right? I was working on it in the early days of Salesforce. com and that was not even 25 years ago, right?

It was, you know, for me, it was 23 years ago. So very early and the pricing model sort of arrived and technology model arrived and the way we do things arrived. And you see that all in the first generation, big cloud companies, big cloud application companies. There's a way you do things. Right. So Aspen is taking a different approach that may or may or may not prove effective. It's to say, well, it's a different approach, a different technical stack, a different approach there and a different pricing approach. It's just much more simple. You get your productivity, $50, you know, $50 a user a month. So it's not this crazy price. And you can't, you don't know what it is.

And you have to angle with your sales rep for discounts. And if you're big companies, this and that and 14 different editions now, it's more like modeled off of Amazon Web Services. There's a price. Okay. And it's a good product. You can buy it. You don't have to buy it. It's a good product. So we will lean into that. And then there's course usage over it. Okay. Let's say you buy five users of $50 a month and you put a terabyte of data in there for some reason. Well, okay. Well, that's not anything that any anybody thought about the lovely overage charges that you will pay monthly on the overage. So you kind of, it's a mix you get, I would say we're shooting for mostly predictable because that's at the end of the day, large businesses would really want mostly predictable, but you have to have this escape hatch to say, yeah, I can't use unlimited compute because that's, that's, you know, that's kind of, that doesn't make sense.

So now we're also going to listen to our early customers and we're very customer friendly company. And if there's a better way to do it, we'll certainly do that. We're after authentically customer success. You got to remember, we're a public benefit corporation. We're after success for our customers, the industries we serve and even our investors. So the thing is, make it simple, get rid of all this noise that it has built up in the systems over time.

Yeah. You know, I, again, I don't really want to make predictions on Falcon because it's early, but in general, I don't think we're going to have a gross margin problem. I think the gross margins will be roughly similar to our software. And here, here's why when we really go deep into Falcon, and we, we have what we call Falcon copies, where we have the real customer data that we're testing, the agents with and developing agents with, we know what's going on. So more and more and more of that work goes into the deterministic software. And we use the non-deterministic models, the anthropic models, et cetera, when you need to. So it's not, you know, a lot of this value is going into the agent.

And then I believe everybody knows it's the cost of these models are going to go down versus whether they're with better hardware or open weight models or et cetera, et cetera. The current cost of the models is not sustainable, not based on what we're doing, but based on this notion of what software development is doing, you know, eating up 50% of the tokens in the world and hundreds of billions of dollars. Somebody's going to build a better mouse trap for that over time, and that'll, that'll compress the prices. That's our belief. But even if that wouldn't happen, I think Falcon would be a great business because we're pushing a lot of things into the deterministic layer.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Tyler. Yeah, I think we are excited to see about all of those products, all the five that I mentioned, EDC, ECOA, RTSM, safety limbs. Every one of those is very large and very strategic in their area. Few of them are around clinical, safety is its own big space, limb is in quality. So each of these is very significant opportunities. And you know, it's slightly different stages as you look across them, but all of them pretty early. And so I think that's what gives us the confidence as we look out to 2030, for example, that we're on track for those goals is we're making great progress in the product, great progress in the execution, great progress getting customers live and happy and successful and reference selling.

We don't put exact timing on that, right? We don't generally talk year by year, so I'm not going to give guidance out beyond this year. But I think we feel very confident in the trajectory that we're on with those products in R&D.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'll take that one. Yeah, the ideal professional profile when you're just starting out is really a nimble type company that really wants to work with you. And I think in this area, you know, probably get a lot of young tech startups, right? Because they're doing something really innovative in what they're doing. And they don't really want to do the same old thing in CRM for core, you know, account contact opportunity management. So I think we have early indications that they'll be great companies to work with. But we'll see. Again, I'll let you know a lot more in the year.

In terms of where the labor is done or where it will be displaced, I think there'll be a combination of internal and outsourced. Although generally not the CROs. That's not what I see. It's a different type of outsourcing. Some of it from the CROs, but not most of it. And then in terms of the pricing, it's very early for that. I know we've been in discussions with customers and their desires for predictability. That's for sure. They want predictability for that because for one thing, they get that predictability when they either hire or outsource labor. It's quite predictable and it's better for them. It's actually better for us too. But what gets in the way of that a little bit is, well, Falcon is quite early now.

So it can do certain things, but it can't do the things that it will do three years from now. So how do you have a fixed price when your capabilities are rapidly improving? So I think with some of our customers, we'll end up having enterprise license agreements, enterprise subscription agreements for the labor based on the size of their company or their function, but it will probably escalate over time. It will be lower in the beginning when Falcon is less mature. So if you want a teenage Falcon, it costs you X. And if you want to, you know, Falcon in the 25 year old, it costs you a bit more. I think it's going to be like that.

But again, this is the type of thing you work out with the early adopters. The nice thing here and the structural advantage we have is this is the same buyer facing the same business problems as our applications. These are people we know deeply that trust is there. You will hear people say, business moves at the speed of trust. And there's a lot to that. And we have the trust with these customers. So we'll get to the right story pretty quickly. All these hinges on having a product that works well. And that's really where our focus is. I would say our early signs are good. When I talked to the engineering and the product management people and Falcon, there's an optimism.

You know, you'll see even the pessimistic ones saying like, oh my goodness, this could really work. And in some early test runs, it's like, wow, we tested this against the humans, what the humans did, and how can the ready better than what the humans did. So there's this sense of optimism, but it's, you know, it's too early to declare success. We have to be very paranoid and pessimistic because we're going into something we haven't done before. Viva has never done a genetic laborer and the whole emotion is new. That's why the leader of Falcon reports right to me. This is a complete new market and a new motion for Viva. So we don't have all the answers yet.

Just just curious, like, it seems like you're a lot more explicit this time around than the cost. Yeah, it's based on our execution and what we're seeing with Salesforce as well. I think Peter alluded to earlier how Salesforce has been struggling with some of the larger projects that they have and they don't really have any customers live. And when you look at what Viva's doing, it contrasts pretty significantly. We have over 180 customers live. We have customers that are turning AI on. We had a big milestone in CRM this quarter where one of our top 20s turned AI on in CRM for their entire field force. So really significant milestone. So the contrast between how Viva is executing and what we're seeing on the other side is very significant.

As Peter mentioned, we're very close with these customers. They buy a lot of products from Viva. We have deep relationships. We stay very close with them. And that's what gives us the confidence, our execution, our innovation, getting customers live, that trust. And that's why you hear the bullishness and the confidence in those winbacks. Just more broadly in the overall market, we're executing very, very well in CRM. It's really clear that we are the market leader. We're going to maintain the market leadership position. And just to kind of paint what we view as the end state, we see Viva maintaining over 70% share in the CRM space, which means we'll continue to execute, we'll continue to drive innovation for our customers.

So we feel really good about how CRM is playing out. Yeah, that we say about our customer interactions there. Yes, we have customer actions that lots of people at Viva do with these customers.

And I personally do at times too. And a common thing you might hear is from a customer is we're not ready to make that decision yet. So they're open to it. They're looking to it. They're not ready yet. So those types of things give us confidence.

We have two major wars going on. We've got a complete tech disruption and AI that's going on. And I think what happened is the last time since industry has gotten used to, hey, the world is going to have a lot of moving parts. And they're just moving forward. So I think it's you're good to point this out. They're not being disrupted by these disruptions. If we would have something really catastrophic in the future, that kind of was disrupting. So for example, if we had a major, major shift in interest rates, well, life sciences and capital intensive industry, that can do things. It's major escalations in war that can do things. But so far, industry seems to be executing pretty well and focusing on the jobs to get done.

And then just on my follow up for the EDC segment, you know, compared to one or two years ago, that was ramping that got a lot of attention. Can you just maybe give us an update on just how those ramping deals are progressing and then just the opportunity to capture additional top 20 over time? Yeah, EDC is one of the larger areas. And it's certainly a long implementation cycle. So some of our winds are still ramping and, you know, we're working with the other ones. We have, I believe it's nine out of the top 20. Most of the other ones are with Medi Data, not all. And, you know, we're working on those over time, but it's not the right time for all customers to change out all systems at one time, getting back to, you know, they have many other things to do.

I would go back to this structural advantage we have in the development cloud applications, all on a common platform, and then with Falcon as well, the structural advantage of Falcons, more things to bring to the same buyer. And especially in clinical, having the clinical operations, clinical data management, and our site solutions, that the site solutions is very strategic to us and we're introducing e-source there. So I think confident on EDC over time, it just takes a while. And that's something that I think you'll see progress in the next couple of years there.

We're really happy with that ICUVA partnership, Gosh. And I discussed with the management team of ICUVA and I can represent that they represent to me that they're very happy with the partnership as well. So yes, and customers are especially appreciative of it. Right. Much less hassle working with even ICUVA. I think great things are going to come out of that partnership. They're already starting to come and I think there's more to come. When you look at it, ICUVA and VIVA, we are both major players to the left sciences industry. We are the two major players. I think it's fair to say by far. And AI is transforming the industry and for AI, you need services, you need data, you need software.

So the more even ICUVA can collaborate, the better it is for the industry, helps the industry grow, helps VIVA grow, helps ICUVA grow. So I couldn't be more happy with that. If you ask me, I feel 500% better about our ICUVA relationship now than I did two years ago. It's probably the best thing that happened to our company, you know, 12 months ago and I was just outstanding. So super happy with that.

Not really any one factor that I point to Andrew and I actually makes us feel so much excitement and, you know, the result is that it was CRM. It was add-ons and new customers and content. It was new customers and brands in data cloud. It was continued growth in cross-ips on both the measurement and the audience's side. It really was broad-based growth around commercial. And I think, I guess what I point to is some of what Peter and Paul have mentioned is that full commercial story and full capability of all those products on one platform from one provider really resonating in the market and driving growth. So very strong quarter from commercial.

Maybe meet their kind of increasing willingness, if that makes sense. Because it does seem like that's another area. I know it's not perfectly correlated to the subscription side, but continues to see healthy momentum and driving that change management for a lot of these enterprises.

I think that the big benefit for Viva that we hopefully see over time here is that by more tech enabling our consulting and our, especially our services, our software will become more valuable. So for example, if somebody wanted to buy our EDC and if it took a billion dollars to implement, nobody would buy it. But if it took $10 in a week, everybody would buy it. So the faster you can have your implementations go and the more accurate the less cost, the more valuable your applications become. So that's the big driver. Yes, it probably means growth for us in services because people will buy more services. But it's about customer success and the industry success and driving our application to this.

I overall think it'll be a renaissance for services and consulting companies as we go forward because I think this notion of tech enabled services, specialized tech enabled services is really going to drive growth rather than going to generalists that say, hey, I have people that can do a lot of things. No, you have a job to get done. You'll probably go to the specialist that has a tech enabled service that can get that done. And I think that will actually lead many companies to do more with partners rather than doing it internally, because they can get the outcome quicker and better with the tech enabled service.

Yeah, Tom, we were, of course, sad to see you go. Tom go, he was that Accenture before he came to even many years ago and was a great Eva partner at Accenture. And Tom's going to go on to be a CEO of a services type partner. And we think that he will be a great partner for us there now. So, you know, all good there. Those relationships don't go away that Tom has, so he will keep those. And in terms of Eva, when customer, especially when you mentioned CRM, gosh, that's a business critical decision that lasts for 10 years. It's involved. There's many, many people involved in that. And there's a product involved with that.

So I don't, that won't, Tom's departure won't have effect on our CRM business because that's more of a, it's an enduring long-standing thing. It's different than maybe consulting tech work or something like that. This is a product attachment. So that's not going to affect our business.

Yeah, so first we're excited about the exceptional quarter that we had. And that was one of the headlines. You heard us talk about three large companies, two in the top 20. Really selecting vaults CRM, biogen selecting vaults CRM. And then of course we have Regeneron as well. But why is pretty simple? And I think we touched on it on this call or it goes back to trust. So they trust Viva to be able to deliver. And then product, product excellence, the product is working. We are delivering on the promise of all the innovation that we've pulled the market we would execute on. And that's playing out in the marketplace.

So it's trust and it's great product. I mean it's really, it simply comes down to those two things. In terms of the remaining top 20 commitments that are out there, there's only two left. So we have 12 of top 20. And there are two remaining. And they'll play out by the end of this year. But we feel good about both of them. They're still need to be finalized. But we like our chances in both and we'll update you as things play out.

Sorry, I was giving a great answer on mute. The customers want to be out of the experimentation phase. They definitely want to be out of that. So some months ago when we first introduced Falcon, I had customers come up to me. Personally, we were at an event and they said, oh, thank goodness you're announcing that because I didn't want to evaluate all these small vendors, you know, so now that you have an offering that helps me not have to go and look at all these small vendors. So yes, it's absolutely what customers want. In terms of acquisitions, we may find others that are a cultural fit, but we'll be very discerning. You know, Copley was an excellent acquisition for us.

And by the way, the Falcon, which is now Falcon and MLR, that is maybe our sales cycles there are probably more advanced than any other part. That market is very ripe for things. But in these other areas, we're getting started and we're making a lot of progress with Falcon. So if we're going to do an acquisition there, it would be more for talent acquisition and not for product because we've put a real good base in Falcon product and Falcon platform. I don't think we'll need acquisitions for product anymore. We did look at some when we were just starting Falcon, you know, we looked at a number, I would say in at least 20 companies to look at.

We found one that was the right fit of culture, product, and that, you know, a willingness to be acquired. And we found that in Copley. So it's sometimes like that. I, for Falcon, I don't actually expect us to find another acquisition that fits and we're not dependent on any acquisition. But we'll see what happens.

In terms of milestones, I think it's probably just, you know, the things that we say on earnings calls and things like that, that would be because it's not going to really be visible milestones. I would say we'll probably give you updates when, you know, when the time is there.

You know, in the other question was based on how will things be better? Is that what the question is you could rephrase that again? Yeah, just what are the specific, you know, customer problems that you're aiming to solve with Aspen versus what some of the existing horizontal CRM platforms struggle with today? Yeah, there's a couple. One is price, price being unpredictable, getting out of control of that. That would be one. The other one would be just sort of dependability of the vendors, right, that you can really count on the vendor to be on your side.

Scalability of the vendor, right, sometimes they want something that really works for a small company that can scale up to a very large. Now in the market, you have to pick like, do I want something that works for a small company or do I get something that's too big for me now, but I can scale up. Other things are just like, you know, data entry, the existing CRM systems, really, if you get into them like, okay, who require a heck of a lot of data entry? Most of that, but AI doesn't, doesn't need to be done anymore. And then I just think there's just this other fundamental thing of better CRM system. And that's just the details of the fundamentally better data model, better business logic, better just details like how do you handle multi currency?

How do you handle forecasting? How do you handle implementation so that you can get the CRM you want for your company in three months rather than getting half of what you want in three years? So I was on the board of zoom for many, many years and, you know, the room was a very small company where I joined and there and very, very few investors wanted to invest in zoom because they thought, well, there's already webex, there's all these other things. But Eric, you know, had an idea, but mine will be fundamentally better, better, better. And that's the same idea here. Now, that's unusual that that could be disrupted. But I think in this case, it will be better, nicer, less expensive, more predictable, faster.

I think all those things add up.

Yeah, we continue to see strengths in the pharma marketing budgets and spend on digital. And that's playing out in cross six. We had before another strong quarter of performance in cross six. AI, what role was that playing? I think that's a nice long term benefit in drivering, what we're doing in cross six as companies. And you've probably heard us talk a little bit about helping companies become an agent that commercial, engage with doctors via AI, they're turning more and more to AI. And as that becomes a more important channel, cross six becomes more important in terms of measuring and understanding and optimizing against that spend. So yeah, absolutely. AI is a nice, will be a nice tailwind for the foreseeable future for for a process.

I will now turn the call back to Peter Gassner for closing remarks. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. And thank you to our customers for your continued partnership and to the team for your outstanding work in the quarter. I'm looking forward to speaking with you again on our upcoming investor day on November 5th. Thank you.