IQVIA Holdings Inc. (IQV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

January 24, 2023

New York Stock Exchange US Health Care Life Sciences Tools and Services special 49 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Robin Taylor

executive
#1

Hello, and welcome, everybody, to today's IQVIA Technologies' webcast, introducing OCE Apps Marketplace, a technology-enabled partnership program, where our speakers will share information on our new program that will allow partners to develop innovative applications for Orchestrated Customer Engagement, or OCE. My name is Robin Taylor, and I'm Head of Partner Marketing for IQVIA Technologies, and I'll be your moderator today. Before we begin, I'd like to go through some key audience tips to give you the best webcast experience. Today's webcast is being streamed through your device. So there's no dial-in number. [Operator Instructions] Now I'd like to introduce our IQVIA Technologies' speakers. Rajesh Patel is Senior Director from the commercial engagement product organization and is responsible for strategic products and partnership support. Tom Hayes is Senior Director and Head of OCE Product Strategy and Commercialization. So with that, we can begin the presentation. Over to you, Tom.

Thomas Hayes

executive
#2

Awesome. Thank you, Robin, for the introduction. And really, thank you, everyone, for joining today. We are very excited to be talking to all of you about a new opportunity within our tech ecosystem that we really believe will drive increased value for our clients, for IQVIA and really most importantly, to this discussion for our expanding partnership community. Now we're going to spend a good amount of time taking this group through our vision of the OCE apps platform, including what it is, how to get started and how you all can leverage this to enrich client relations, drive brand view and ultimately, build new revenue streams with the life sciences commercial space. But given the awesome mix of audience that we have today, I thought it would be really good to at least walk through some high-level background on our customer engagement product suite and what is leading us to bring this concept to the group today. So this is a bit of an oversimplification, and I'm not going to get into the detail or at least full details today. But for those who have focused in this space, we know the commercial engagement model for life sciences has been changing for some time. And there's no denying that the pandemic accelerated a lot of these changes and drove a whole new level of digital transformation to this space. Successful customer engagement now requires new ways of working. It requires greater precision, speed and scale. It requires real-time insights to improve decision-making. It requires a relentless focus on customers' rapidly changing needs. And all in all, it requires smarter customer engagement. But more stakeholders, more channels and explosion of industry data has all come with ever-increasing challenges for life sciences companies to really do this successfully and keep up with these changing global dynamics. So what are we doing to address this? IQVIA has really been ahead of these trends for some time now, and we are uniquely positioned within the global marketplace. We have proactively built and matured a full commercial ecosystem for life sciences, backed by the largest set of industry data and intelligence and build upon a full suite of technology and services. Now at the backbone and the primary technology element of this ecosystem is our Orchestrated Customer Engagement platform, or otherwise known as OCE. So what is it? At a very high level, and we certainly won't be going through the depths of OCE today, but it's a next-generation orchestrated tech suite that creates personalized, relevant, and timely interactions through each stage of engagement across the entire commercial omnichannel ecosystem. It connects sales, marketing, medical, compliance, and really every other applicable life sciences persona, while ultimately placing the customer at its very center. Now this is all powered by IQVIA-connected intelligence, which allows us to embed contextual real-time insights across end-to-end persona-based workflows, enabling smarter engagement, ensuring stakeholders remain aligned across all personal and digital touch points and providing the right tools necessary to engage in a way that is relevant and compliant for each and every customer. Simply put, it provides the capabilities and insights to proactively address all of those industry dynamics and fully optimize our clients' commercial engagement by bringing the right messages to the right audience across the right channels at the right time. Now as noted, as you may have seen on the previous slide, we take a truly platform-to-platform approach to this. I'm not going to go into the deep and really the details around all of these different capabilities. But from advanced CRM components to digital multichannel marketing, through customer portals, fee-for-service management, grants funding, compliance, business rules engines, component authoring, content capabilities and much, much more, our suite provides really everything necessary across the end-to-end ecosystem for omnichannel engagement. As noted here, our suite is built upon and orchestrated through best-in-class technologies to really drive connected experiences and insights across the platform. And finally, we take a fully open ecosystem approach, being able to provide us and these capabilities in either a very modular fashion for our clients or bringing the full suite of components into our clients' ecosystems. Now how have we been doing so far? So while our company's history, experience and legacy platforms within the space dates back decades, since the initial launch in 2017 of this next-generation platform, we've really seen substantial growth at a global scale. As of the end of 2022, we now have over 220 global clients on the tech suite, including representation across all core life sciences segments, including mid to large pharma, small VP, med tech, consumer health. We have active users across 110 countries and a community that expands the globe across every single continent outside of an Antarctica. Finally, and really while we're here today, as noted, IQVIA itself has brought a lot of in-house capabilities to this expanding ecosystem, but innovation from our partnership community has been and remains a critical element to our continued global expansion and success within this market. IQVIA Technologies is investing heavily and continuing to develop the most advanced technology portfolio in life sciences industry to really address all of our customers' business challenges. And to support this bold mission, we're continuing to build out one of the healthiest partnership ecosystems in the industry, especially to support directly the OCE platform itself. Now within the structure, we continue to identify areas for increased partnership across this community, which is why we're excited today to bring a new opportunity in the form of OCE apps. So what is OCE apps? The ultimate vision behind this, or at least from our perspective, is to create a platform to enable our partners, our clients to design, develop and distribute their own apps within the OCE ecosystem. This enables our partners to accelerate innovation and drive new capabilities into the market for our clients above and beyond our standard OCE product releases. Ultimately, this will enable our customers to build on top of the OCE platform, to extend the product in ways that are very specific to them, to deploy their own time line and release cycles through expedited distribution of app capabilities and really increase the overall return on investments within our broader commercial ecosystem. Now how does this all work? So while it's very open to be built by any partner with the appropriate skill set and training, development of these apps is greatly accelerated by a series of OCE app recipes, which are built and supported by the OCE product team. This platform, combined with the recipes, ultimately, create a governed container to render a custom app directly within the client's OCE environment, really eliminating the need for access to multiple applications or the typical costs that come from traditional customizations. Now some additional notes to this. This platform supports a wide range of capabilities from apps, tabs and widgets and a number of other items that can be enabled directly within the mobile device or web browser of our customers. From an app standpoint, we are currently available on web, iPad and iPhone. We are exploring a potential pilot for Windows and Android in 2023, but that's very much TBD based on expected demand as we move forward. Now when it comes to where these reside, Raj is going to speak in a bit more depth on this in just a moment, but there are really two options that we have now built out to bring these apps to our client base. First is an OCE app store. It's a private marketplace for individual clients to house their custom OCE apps and really enable access across their global environments as applicable. The second piece, and what we're especially keen on building out with this group further in the future, is our OCE app marketplace. This is a full repository of all public apps, which can be viewed accessed and leveraged by OCE clients and our entire global community. The best way to think of this would be Salesforce app exchange, which was -- this was very much inspired by, for those who are familiar with it or really any other technology marketplace that's out there. And how realistic thus far? We've actually made a lot of progress to date. So we started a pilot build of recipes early on in 2021 and have really continued to mature this out with a limited group of clients and initial partners. Now as noted to date, we have about 20 app recipes, with 18 live client apps and over 100 different applications in various stages of ideation, design and build. So it's gained a lot of traction with these early initial pilot clients as well as some of the initial partners that we have. Now the majority of this has been done intentionally through the private app stores. But given the growth and early success of the soft launch, in addition to the continued growth and expansion of our global client base, we are now at a comfortable point to bring us to a wider community, provide our clients increased access to different app options and really open the door to more rapid expansion and growth of our public OCE app marketplace. So I'm not going to go into too much detail and through a whole lot of different case studies, but I wanted to provide some context just to make it a bit more tangible, a bit more real to put some ideas. So here's a case of a recent OCE client. They were recently looking to build out very custom views for sales reps, in particular for pre-call information, in addition to some custom metrics to enhance sales performance tracking. Now they started to look at different custom options that they could do internally or potentially logging within our overarching road map and waiting for the release of it from a global product perspective. But ultimately, they took a look at the OCE app approach and chose a third party to build this out for them. Now at the end of the day, it proved to be a much more cost-effective, a more timely approach, and they've now enabled this functionality across each and every account within their different environments. So a couple of more examples here, and I won't go in depth on every single one, but you get a bit of a flavor for the different things that can be done here, from an app that connects contact details with Twitter activity, to dynamic KOL dashboards, to a fully custom digital insights dashboard that drives activities and engagement ratings based on proprietary calculations. So hopefully, this all gives a little sense of what can be done. But in general, the type of apps, the complexity, the overall possibilities can really range greatly from very small widgets, up to large-scale functionality that can drive regional nuance or critical capabilities for expanding market segments. Now finally, from a bit of an IQVIA perspective, we've already seen a great amount of early value from these. And we're really extremely optimistic on where these could go in the future. But what does it mean to this audience? Why should you all consider building out these apps? And there's a number of inherent benefits that we see this bringing to partners, but we've kept it pretty simple for today's session. Now first and foremost, it's an opportunity to build and grow new revenue range. This can either be done directly with clients through the building support of applications for their private app store through licensing models, through apps posted to the public marketplace or really through a combination of both, building out a custom app for a client, then bringing it to the marketplace for expanded reach and greater access to the broader client set. Now obviously, that latter scenario would be fully dependent on your agreement with the client, but it gives you a flavor and idea of how you can approach this and start growing revenue opportunities within this capability. The next, you have an ability to build new or really enriched existing client relationships within life sciences by solving critical needs for them. Now we've already seen early on with some of the pilot partners that once a client sees the value of the initial apps and the speed that they can bring and the benefits that it can bring, there tends to be a continued demand for more and more of these, which has driven that number of the 100-plus new concepts and ideation in different various stages of design to build. And then finally, brand value. Raj will speak to the dynamics of how IQVIA will be promoting this to clients. But through the public marketplace, you'll have the ability to further increase overall brand awareness and value, while really accelerating innovation for life sciences. So that all being said, I've probably spoken enough, and I'm going to be handing this off to my colleague, Raj, who's going to be walking through how to get started with OCE apps for any of those who are interested. Raj?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#3

Thanks, Tom. So now that you know what it is, let's talk a little bit more about the program and how to get started to building your very own OCE app, right? We've laid out a 4-step process to support our partners in their build journey. The first step is to become aware of the program, understand the benefits and ultimately sign the agreement, which will provide you with the access and the necessary assets. The second step is to identify an opportunity for a specific customer or one that's applicable to a broader customer base, right, which is the marketplace that Tom mentioned. Now important -- it's important to know that step 1 and step 2 may be switched and interchangeable depending on your situation and where you are in your journey. For example, you may opt to validate your idea before enrolling in the program, and that's okay. Others may enroll in the program and will subsequently repeat step 2 onwards for each of their apps. Now once your idea or customer need is validated, you're really ready to initiate the build process. As Tom mentioned, we'll provide you with recipe apps, which will accelerate your development, but more importantly, enable a consistent user experience. So whatever app you build, it feels like it's part of the user experience. Its integrate doesn't feel like something that's sitting outside. Once you've gone through that process, you're then ready to publish and market your app and prepare it to support your user base. So let's go one by one through each of these steps in more detail. With the enroll step, we have multiple partnership programs at IQVIA, and all of which come with its own benefits. As a partner, you're assigned to an individual from our partner organization to support you and maintain the relationship. So they're your go-to person in case you have any needs, questions or concerns. So if you're already enrolled in one of these programs, reach out to your assigned partner to enroll in this program. If you don't have a partner assigned or you're not aware of who it may be, send an e-mail to IQVIAPartnerships@IQVIA.com. And I'll probably say this 3 be more time so you haven't missed it. Now what do you get by enrolling in this partnership? Essentially, it's the IQVIA tools and assets to get you started. First, you also get access to a contact dedicated, as I mentioned, as well as access to the partner portal, and the partner portal is really your go-to-stop for all the information you need, right? You also get access to product documentation, training and certification, and I'll get into that a little bit more on the next slide, and the ability to tract training progress and credentials at an individual level, right? So you can get training by individual. You also get access to our sandbox, which is the OCE environment, essentially serving as your playground and your environment to testing to ensure and validate your app. Access to our support tiers. We have a partner portal as we have very various levels of support, depending on your question, all the way leading up to our product organization. And this really allows you to lock tickets for issues and questions behind the documentation that's accessible to you. And then lastly, we also have a review and approval process, which I'll talk to, which really help get some feedback and input from the product organization to ensure you're set up for success, both from a business perspective as well as a technical perspective. And then lastly, given that you do have access to the sandbox and the OCE personal application, you'll also have access to the automatic upgrades for your sandbox. So whether that be our major release, which happens 3x a year, or our minor releases, which happen monthly, you'll have that upgraded automatically within your orgs. You also have access to the released webinars, which contain an [indiscernible] of improvements, not just to the core product itself, but as we continue to build upon recipe apps, those will get covered in those webinars as well. So those of you who are enrolled in some of our partner programs and access -- have access to the trainings, you likely are aware by now that we provide learning plans based on personas and focus areas of the product. So the trainings are very much catered to the job functions or your objective, right? So not everybody is going -- having to go through a standard training that may not be applicable to the function that you're doing. So similarly, we created an e-learning course with the learning plan for OCE apps. This includes the high-level overviews and the OCE basics e-learning course to get you familiar with the product and understand the basics of what it is and what it caters. It's then followed by the Sales Rep Basics course, which focuses on the sales rep persona, which is a core persona in the product itself and the functions performed in the application. The 2 of these combined will help you understand the business aspect of the product and really help you understand any of the functional use cases that you may end up pursuing. The remaining 2 are more geared towards someone in a technical role, with the first being a course on [ OCP ] administration and the second focusing specifically on the OCE apps capability itself, both also come with an online qualification form. And holistically, all of the overview course come with an online qualification quota. Needless to say, it's also important that you have knowledge to Salesforce and obviously Trailhead is available to you and serve as a good supplemental training as needed as well. So now that we've covered the informal part of the program and the benefits, let's move on to the ideate phase of the program. So really, you have 2 opportunities to build apps, and it's important that you use your network and references in the industry or the OCE customer base to ideate around this and validate your ideas. As you see on the left side, you can build in response to a direct customer need, a scenario where a customer has a specific and unique need that warrants a custom solution because it's not something that we, as a product, may do because of benefits to a product user base or a customer has some urgent time lines and need to develop something that's more fitting to their time lines, right? So in this scenario, your customer would hire one of our partners to come in and build the app for them. And this is sort of the scenario that we've seen more recently in our initial phases. Customer would -- in this scenario, customer eventually owns the app and continue to ask the partner to support or transition to their center of excellence or internal resource after it's been built and launched. Now on the right side is a scenario where you may uncover a need for a solution that may benefit the broader industry or customer base. Now this is the true marketplace concept that Tom mentioned. And this is a true business opportunity for you to build an app, price it and put it in the marketplace for other customers to subscribe and installed in the org. In this model, you own the IP as well as the app itself. And in this scenario, we do require that you submit a business justification form, which is going to list out your business case or use case, and we'll work with the product owners to validate that. And I'll talk a little bit more about this in the next section. And one thing to highlight, a customer may come to you with the need to build a specific app for them. And you may choose to evaluate that need for the broader marketplace. And if you see a need to pursue a more [indiscernible] app to post the marketplace, it's an opportunity for you to go and have that discussion with the customer, whether you build this specifically for them and build the customer for them or productize it and then enable it for a broad user base, right? We'll get into that discussion about how to monetize that and who owns the IP. Now behind the scenes, we're also working on inventory and potential opportunities for OCF that we can pass along to partners and expose to our partners. Right now, we're building a process to flag customer requests that come towards us and that we can become aware as a potential opportunity for OCF. We're not there yet, but we expect to have an initial list by end Q1. So how do you get business approval? You want to work directly with your IQVIA assigned partner to get a copy of the form that I mentioned. Once you request that, they'll send it to you, you'll complete it and send it back to them. Again, if you don't have a assigned partner or don't know who it is, send the e-mail to IQVIAPartnerships@IQVIA.com. This form will specifically focus on an overview and that help us understand your value prop, your capabilities that you're intending to target and the target time frame amongst a few other things. The form will make its way over to our product organization who will initiate a review period. Now this step is actually meant to help you with a focus on a couple of things. It's really for your benefit than it is for ours, right? One, it helps us understand your objective. And as the product owners are reviewing, they may share ideas or choose to collaborate or get you connected to a customer for a specific need. Two, perhaps we already have a capability around this, but you may be unaware. So this will potentially help you avoid wasted investment, right? Truly help you validate your business case from what we've seen in the market, what we build and how customers have used the solution. And lastly, it's possible that we may not have a capability in production today, so you may see this opportunity. But oftentimes, it may be something that we're actually actively building and is being delivered in the upcoming. And this may be 1 or 2 things, right, and maybe the capability itself or it may be a recipe that may ultimately end up helping your supporting [indiscernible]. If there are any clarifications that are required, that will come back to you by the way of your partner who may facilitate the discussion if needed. If all is good, you can see confirmation of approval from your partner, and that will be a confirmation to move forward with the development. cycle. Because of these reasons, it's important that you go through this step for every app you intend to build or ideate around and publish in the marketplace, right? It's not intended again to slow you down or block you from building something. It's really more designed to ensure that you are set up for success once your app is published in the marketplace. This is not as critical if you're building an app for the customer as our hope is that the step will likely be handled by the customer through the relationship and support model. and they've already validated that this makes sense for them to invest in. So now that our app is approved from a business perspective or the ideas approved, we're ready to start development. As Tom mentioned earlier, our product organization is really investing in capabilities to help our partners and customers build these apps and by way of building recipe apps. Recipe apps are exactly as they [ shown ], really intended to serve as recipes for certain functions. And as you can see, there's a number of them. They will help accelerate your development and ensure that you maintain the standards that apply across that app, specifically to maintain a consistent user experience. Initially, we started with a limited set of recipe apps, but now we have close to 20 recipe apps across different functions and modules. So the apps recipes will serve as guidance to build your apps in terms of resources and technical skill set. We'll cover this in more detail in an upcoming technical webinar that will follow this one. But at a high level and it's important that your technical resources have experience with React and JavaScript development, with respect to mobile app development. We also need to set up a few tools, some of which are open source that you can see at the bottom here, to set up your development environment. Again, we'll go this in more detail in our technical webinar. So like I said, I won't spend too much time on this right now as well as it can be a bit technical, but some highlights to share on the workflow around developing and publishing your app. First, you want to enable your orgs for the app store and associated settings. This is going to be important because it is what you used to reunite where the development team submit for approval, and then initiate your bill cycle, your packaging strategy as well as testing in the sandbox once that's available through the app store. You want to ensure your app has 75% cold coverage with unit test, and this is one of the things that our engineering team will be looking at, once they approve and review the app as well as that you completed security code scans prior to your submission to approval. The status of the app will be managed in the App Store itself and the engineering team will reach out to the org admin for any feedback or review points that they may have. Once passed, and you have received the confirmation from the engineering team around your app and they signed off on it the admin will need to complete a few steps before it's ready to be published in the store of the marketplace. So Tom mentioned this earlier as well, right? But what are we doing to help promote the OCE app concept in the marketplace and potentially your app? And there's many avenues and channels that we leverage today to market, and I'll talk about a few of them here, right? So first off, your app will be posted in the marketplace. This marketplace will be accessible to any customer who enables the marketplace. And the app itself will have a profile page with images and description. So customers and prospective users can actually see and evaluate the objective of your app and what value profit it will deliver. So consumers can actually browse and view that just like any other app store out there. We also have this concept of OCE communication, which we use as a broad communication channel that goes out internally/externally. This is often an e-mail communication that includes specific content for our consumers, whether they be internal or external. And it comes anything from release timings, it's been used for [ Digi NOFX ], downtimes, potential hits. So if we see requests coming in for certain things, we leverage this avenue to get that communication now, et cetera. And so where it makes sense, when we potentially include announcements around apps capabilities that may be out there. We're also looking at inclusion to IQVIA sales assets. We're starting to talk about OCE apps and generate awareness to current customers as well as prospective customers. And as we start to do this and as more apps are out there, we'll start to leverage and profile some apps that you may build as part of those sales assets. You also have an opportunity to showcase your app in the partner portal to generate awareness amongst the peers and the partner committee. So other partners may be able to see what success areas you have and what apps and capabilities exist out there. We'll be marketing OCE apps through our standard associated in the marketplace as part of our broader OCE marketing, communication and campaigns, and that's obviously an opportunity where we'll get the concept out there in the industry as well. And then lastly, we have internal comms, which we used to generate awareness, backed by our global sales and delivery and support network, as well as the account network. And so we want to generate awareness to all of the IQVIA organization that support us and that may be in front of customers, so to generate awareness around this capability as well as app -- potential apps that maybe out there. So for all of our programs, we typically charge a fee to cover our costs, to support and sustain that program. So for this program, the fee is broken down into 2 main categories, the partnership program fee itself, for which the list fee right now is $5,000 per org per year. The second fee component is the access to the training, which is $15.75 per individual per year. At the moment, for this program, running a promotion, waiving the program fee for the first year as well as a training fee for the first individual. So let's say you signed the agreement enrolled in the program on May 15, essentially your renewal will be May 15, 2024, and no fees for the program will be due from 2023 to May 2024, and you'll have access to the assets and support through that period. Additionally, for any apps in the public marketplace, we will not pursue revenue sharing at this time. We recognize that this is a new area of opportunity, and in some cases, may require investment from you that truly drive success of the ecosystem. We're limiting passing on our costs through this initial period to help drive success. Okay. So how to proceed next? First, establish relationship with your partner, as we've talked about, so they can guide you on a path forward. Behind the scenes, myself, including the key product resources, are supporting the partner team with this initiative. Look out for an announcement on a more focused technical session, where we'll dive deeper into a demo as well as the steps to execute from end-to-end. So for this one, we'll do a detailed walk-through of the development life cycle and provides you with an opportunity to ask more focused questions as well. We're still working on some of the logistics and timing here, but are targeting this around early March time frame. And then lastly, enrolling the partnership, so you have access to the assets and support needed to succeed. We'll close off with some of the resources and support that's available. So if you want to close out with a message for those who are already enrolled and started, you may be familiar and aware of this. The partner portal is a great resource for everything you need. You'll find the relevant content, including configs, step guides as well as access to our ticketing system, which will get you direct support and response to specific questions that may come up. So I do hope you have a better understanding of this program and the value of OCE apps. We are very excited about this capability. We think it's going to drive innovation forward, accelerate opportunities for our customers and provide more flexibility and really serve as an opportunity to drive innovation forward, and join -- enable partners to join us in this journey and also create business opportunities with our customer base. So with that, I'm going to hand it off to Robin, and we'll get into questions.

Robin Taylor

executive
#4

Thanks so much, Tom and Raj. That was full of lots of great information. Let's move on to Q&A. [Operator Instructions] Do I need to be certified on OCE to build an OCE app?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#5

I'll take that. Our recommendation it is because, obviously, the OCE apps sits on the OCE platform, the OCE [indiscernible] platform. It's important that you understand the structure, the data model and the existing capabilities, and that certification process will help you get there and give you an understanding of that. This will help you validate and make you more efficient in doing the process, right? At this time, it's really a value for our consumers and those building OCE apps to take that overview course. It's about approximately 8 hours. So not a lot of time, and if you're already an experienced Salesforce developer or admin or an architect, it will help you and ground you with some good business aspects of those and technical aspects to make you successful.

Robin Taylor

executive
#6

Great. Is it necessary for the customer to purchase any additional licenses or users to use OCE apps?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#7

At this time, we have a similar promotional period as well. We're -- it's something we may evaluate in the future. But at this time, there's not a separate add-on cost for access to this capability.

Thomas Hayes

executive
#8

And more specifically, when it comes to the licenses, I think it was probably in regards to the user licenses on OCE already. Now you'd be -- it's part of the OCE environment, you'd be leveraging the licenses that they already have. Now the licensing agreements that you have with the client for building that out would be specific to your agreement with the client.

Robin Taylor

executive
#9

Okay. We have another one about using recipes. Is the app building using Workato, Tray.io or another type of integration platform?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#10

Yes, I'll take that. We can get [indiscernible] more on the technical webinar, but essentially, you can use a lot of the capabilities around that you see in the APIs that exist and the OCE apps capability to build the capabilities, to build your app.

Robin Taylor

executive
#11

Okay. What's the best way for partners to know which apps are relevant for OCE and for our mutual clients?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#12

Yes. As I mentioned, a couple -- there's a couple of avenues to explore here, right? First being, if you have an idea or you have relationship with customer or industry, that will be your best source for an opportunity to kind of validate what's going to make the most sense, right? We do encourage that you go through the business approval, review and approval process because that will engage the product organization in helping get some ideas out. Hopefully, by the end of Q1, we're also going to be in a position where we can inventory and flag things that we've heard from customers that we can share with partners for opportunities to pursue, right? So right now, in the initial period, you're going to want to use your network and channel and relationships to identify opportunity areas and leverage the process that we've laid out to bet and makes sense to validate that. And then as we progress with time, we'll also have an inventory that we're maintaining from a customer base so that if they're interested in pursuing the build out of an OCF, we can get you started with some ideations.

Robin Taylor

executive
#13

Great. I'm just going to put out a reminder that we will have a more technical webinar in the future for some of the more technical questions. Next question is, can you give us a flavor of the apps that have already been developed, specific use case?

Thomas Hayes

executive
#14

Yes, sure. And I talked to that a little bit earlier in my section. I think you see a wide range, as I noted before, of different use cases and different features that are currently in design. A lot of the early work has been based around the visualization of custom data elements, taking a look at custom displays for different personas within the mobile app. I talked about the Twitter feed and inputs from external applications and how that can be rolled in and visualized within the app. I talked about some different data elements that are pulling information from within the OCE ecosystem and bringing that to a sales rep, bringing that to sales rep managers as well from a performance standpoint. But it can really expand beyond that. There's a lot of ideas in the works right now around filling critical gaps at a global perspective. We take a look at regional nuances across different market segments, across different compliance and regulation factors and how each and every company interprets those rules and builds out their own unique processes to do this, and this can help enable those gaps and create really custom-specific capabilities for the clients.

Robin Taylor

executive
#15

Is there any opportunity for firms to experience in building custom mobile apps outside the partnership program?

Thomas Hayes

executive
#16

Robin, can you repeat that one?

Robin Taylor

executive
#17

Sorry about that. Is there an opportunity for firms of experience in building custom mobile outside of the partnership program for a specific work for partners?

Thomas Hayes

executive
#18

So technically, there -- I guess, you could say there would be if you have a relationship with an existing client on OCE and are already acclimated and familiar with product. But as Raj mentioned, the certification process, the training process, will truly make sure that these are enabled in an appropriate manner that functions well and can be done in an accelerated way to really drive the benefit. We would strongly recommend, even if you do have an existing relationships, to still go through the training programs. That's part of the reason why we are waiving the fees on this for the foreseeable future because we think it just drives a whole lot of benefit to our partners and to the community to be able to drive the most value for our client base.

Rajesh Patel

executive
#19

Yes. And it's important to also recognize, right, that with the partnership program, you get access to the content, the material as well as an environment, right? And that's -- you're going to need that to go through the review and approval process as well as to building -- accessing the toolkits necessary to build your app.

Robin Taylor

executive
#20

Will you be charging for the OCE apps in the future?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#21

At this time, I'll go back to kind of what I said, right? There's a couple of aspects to the fee itself. One is joining the partnership program itself, and there is a cost that we're waiving right now. Same concept for the access to OCE apps itself, so the toolkits and the capability stability for customers. Right now, that is not an additional charge that through this promotional period. It's something we're going to evaluate in the future. But right now, we're really keen on enabling our customers and our partners to pursue this, right? Obviously, we have costs. So it's not something that we're -- we may not end up doing in the future. I think we'll have to assess that, but we really want to drive value for our customers and our partners right now. And then based on how that materializes, hopefully, we all benefit from that.

Robin Taylor

executive
#22

Right. Another question it's -- asks, will apps that work with the OCE also need to be listed on the Salesforce app exchange?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#23

If I heard that correctly, will apps also need to be listed on the Salesforce app exchange? The short answer is the OCE marketplace, whether that be the private store or the market public marketplace, is sort of bounded. It's our own OCE sort of community, right? So the app that you built for the OCE framework will really just be targeted and built for the OCE products. And I don't think it will be -- right now, we're not recommending listing it on the app -- Salesforce app exchange since it's only targeting OCE customers.

Robin Taylor

executive
#24

That's right. And they are separate app marketplaces?

Thomas Hayes

executive
#25

Yes, exactly. Separate app exchanges, and you would need the OCE applications to enable these apps anyway. So the value of the Salesforce exchange is diminished within that, but certainly posting within our own.

Robin Taylor

executive
#26

Okay. Another question is we have a suitable product that's managed/packaged. Can we list that on OCE apps? Or we need to develop a specific app for that?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#27

You're going to want to build this -- I mean you're going to want to build a specific app for that, right? Because if you have a managed app right now, we'll need to go through our process to do it, right? And you can certainly push it through the process if it meets the criteria through the capabilities. But remember, this is targeted. The real value, we think, is going to come through the mobile capabilities, and that's going to be important to -- as that's where a lot of our user base really sits, right? So if you think there's a value prop behind pushing some of the capabilities that you've built into our marketplace, we'll certainly entertain that idea and urge you to go through the process, so you can validate that and we have an understanding and it can help you validate the business proposition behind that.

Thomas Hayes

executive
#28

Yes, I agree, Raj, at least initiate the conversation. Go through that ideation phase. Let's have -- let's take a look at it, and we can help assess the value and what the best approach for it is going forward.

Robin Taylor

executive
#29

Another question is if in the future there will be a revenue-sharing scheme introduced, is there a general rule of thumb on the split to be expected?

Thomas Hayes

executive
#30

Yes. So I think, Raj, you covered it in this answer. It's kind of a continuation of that. In the foreseeable future, we do not have any expectations around our revenue-sharing mechanism. Our goal is to build this up, and that's why it was not applicable both now and in the future going forward. The only thing that Raj mentioned, as we move forward and as this continues to grow, is really our cost to support these efforts with our different partners. But even at that, like we said, at the gate during this promotional period, everything is waived. But nothing planned around revenue sharing.

Robin Taylor

executive
#31

Great. Thanks. Will you provide customer lists for marketing of the apps?

Thomas Hayes

executive
#32

No. So we're not going to provide, and I think Raj you may have covered this before. We're not going to provide direct customer lists. You have 2 options of engagement with the customers, one through existing client relationships that you may already have through different elements, but even more so through the public marketplace. That's why we're very keen on bringing applications to the marketplace. You're able to promote across our entire client suite, and they're able to see those and be able to approach you directly for whatever is applicable. But at this time, we're not going to be sharing anything specifically.

Rajesh Patel

executive
#33

Yes. What I will say, to complement that, though, right, if you do have an idea that makes sense, right, we will evaluate that and we may pursue a discussion with the customer and make that connection to validate and get some feedback, right? So there is an opportunity for co-creation, opportunity to kind of validate the value and potential getting it for a customer's perspective on that.

Thomas Hayes

executive
#34

Yes. It's a very fair point, Raj, and it kind of goes along the lines that you're saying of our maturation around our product requests and being able to extract those and bring those to the community for different ideas. So something that we can help probably more in an informal way of pairing ideas with clients who may be looking for them.

Robin Taylor

executive
#35

Another question. Does IQVIA provide enablement support for the partner sales team?

Rajesh Patel

executive
#36

We -- I'll try to take a stab at that. There's a couple of aspects here, right? We provide partner support and we will through this program for any questions and ideas you want to bet through us, right? And the approval process as well as your partner contact will facilitate that, right? In terms of direct support, we'll -- there's a couple of marketing channels that I've mentioned. We may introduce some referral capabilities. And if it makes sense, there may be some opportunities to partner, right? But I think it will depend case by case of what the need is and where the opportunities lie, and we'll evaluate that accordingly.

Thomas Hayes

executive
#37

Yes. The other aspect, too, is -- and Raj may have mentioned this before, is you'll have access to our continued rollout of feature updates as a partnership community and where our product suite is going as we look forward. And that comes with different decks and materials that could be leveraged in your conversations with how your ideas and the different apps that you build fit within the system. So there's plenty of content that does come.

Robin Taylor

executive
#38

Okay. I think that's about all the questions we have. Give me a minute. There are a couple that are more technical that we can address separately at our technical webinar. That will be in roughly early March. We'll have details about that coming out. If there's nothing else today, I think we'll wrap up. If you'd like any additional information on our OCE apps program, we welcome you to visit our web page on iqvia.com, or reach out via e-mail at IQVIAPartnerships@IQVIA.com. And finally, a reminder that the on-demand version of today's presentation will be sent out within 2 business days and available via your webinar link. So with that, and on behalf of today's presenters on IQVIA Technologies, I'd like to thank you for joining us and hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.

Thomas Hayes

executive
#39

Thank you, everyone.

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