{"id":35843,"date":"2026-04-07T15:07:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T13:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/askme.it\/insights\/pharma-crm-in-2026-the-duopoly-has-broken\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T17:54:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T15:54:36","slug":"pharma-crm-in-2026-the-duopoly-has-broken","status":"publish","type":"insights","link":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/insights\/pharma-crm-in-2026-the-duopoly-has-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"Pharma CRM in 2026: the duopoly has broken"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For fifteen years almost every conversation about pharmaceutical CRM has revolved around a single player. According to market reconstructions published in 2024 and 2025, Veeva has consolidated an estimated share of around 80% of the global life sciences CRM market, with fiscal year 2025 revenue of $2.747 billion, up 16% year over year, and fiscal 2026 guidance between $3.58 and $3.60 billion. This balance broke formally in September 2025, when the historic contract between Veeva and Salesforce expired, and operationally on October 11, 2025, when Salesforce made Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement generally available.<\/p>\n

In the two months after launch Salesforce announced it had signed more than forty life sciences customers, including AstraZeneca on December 4, 2025 as a unified global platform and Novartis on December 17, 2025 with a five-year rollout. Veeva responded in December 2025 with the production launch of AI Agents for Vault CRM and brought Vault CRM customers above 125 by March 2026, with ten of the twenty largest global biopharma companies already committed and an internal projection that sees them reaching fourteen.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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The end of the Veeva-Salesforce contract and the timeline to 2029<\/h2>\n

Veeva announced the non-renewal of the Salesforce contract in December 2022. The contract expired in September 2025. Vault CRM, the next-generation platform built entirely on Veeva’s proprietary Vault Platform, has been generally available since April 2024 and is the product on which Veeva onboards all new customers. Legacy Veeva CRM, the one built on top of Salesforce, reaches end of support on December 31, 2029, a deadline Veeva accelerated from the originally communicated September 2030.<\/p>\n

Translated into an operational agenda: over the next thirty-six months practically the entire Veeva installed base will have to move to Vault CRM or migrate to an alternative platform. Veeva projects around two hundred Vault CRM customers live by the end of fiscal 2026, but the main migration volume will take place between 2026 and 2029. For anyone who had never questioned the CRM choice since joining the company, this is the moment the decision returns to the table.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Salesforce enters production and signs the top 20<\/h2>\n

Salesforce built Life Sciences Cloud by licensing IQVIA’s OCE software in April 2024; OCE remains supported for its four hundred global customers until 2029, but on a migration path coordinated toward the Salesforce platform. From a market perspective, this means that effective independent options have narrowed to two \u2014 Vault CRM and Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud \u2014 with OCE as a managed-sunset variant.<\/p>\n

The October 2025 general availability was accompanied by a series of high-profile signings: AstraZeneca in early December, Novartis two weeks later, and in Italy Chiesi in April 2026 with a global perimeter of 3,300 users. Fidia joined as an early adopter back in September 2025. Pfizer, Takeda, Boehringer Ingelheim, Haleon and Moderna are among the names cited in Salesforce communications at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026. The platform was rebranded Agentforce Life Sciences as part of the Agentforce 360 launch and includes pharma-specific functionality \u2014 Smart Summaries, Key Account Management, Intelligent Content \u2014 with Regulated Content Management and Marketing Cloud Next planned on the roadmap for the second half of 2026.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Veeva’s response: native AI agents on Vault<\/h2>\n

On December 3, 2025 Veeva made AI Agents for Vault CRM generally available. The first wave includes the Pre-call Agent, which builds engagement plans with traceable rationale by reading CRM data and external signals; the Voice Agent, based on Apple Intelligence, which dictates visit notes and automatically populates call reports; the Free Text Agent, which performs a real-time compliance check on unstructured notes before saving; and the Media Agent, which enables conversational retrieval of approved promotional content.<\/p>\n

The technology stack declared by Veeva is based on Anthropic and Amazon models hosted on Amazon Bedrock, with the option to build custom agents via Vault AI on Bedrock or on Azure AI Foundry. A relevant architectural choice is the pricing model: Veeva AI Agents are included at no additional cost for Vault CRM customers. Salesforce, on the opposite side, proposes a model with Agentforce 1 Edition starting at $550 per user per month, with a consumption-based Flex Credits system. For organizations with three thousand medical representatives, the difference between a bundled and a metered model is on the order of several million dollars per year, and is probably the most debated point in 2026 RFPs.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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What really changes in the purchase decision<\/h2>\n

Five questions separate Vault CRM from Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud in 2026. The first is sample management and PDMA compliance in the United States and its European equivalents: chain-of-custody traceability, electronic signature, automatic reconciliation. Veeva is native in this domain; Salesforce inherits components from the OCE heritage and depends on partners. The second is the MSL workflow and the separation between commercial and medical: Veeva Medical CRM is a distinct and mature product, while Salesforce addresses this with Medical-Commercial Coordination inside Agentforce Life Sciences, a new module whose case studies are still being built.<\/p>\n

The third is MLR review of promotional materials: Veeva’s PromoMats is effectively the industry standard, with PromoMats 25R3 introducing the agentic Quick Check in 2025. Salesforce announced Regulated Content Management for late 2026, a maturity gap that weighs heavily today. The fourth is the data model for the 360-degree HCP view: Salesforce plays on Data Cloud, Data 360 and MuleSoft, a horizontal platform rich in connectors; Veeva plays on Vault Platform, Direct Data API and OpenData\/Link as reference data, a tighter verticality but with less semantic translation to do. The fifth is the AI economic model, already mentioned above, and is the point where the five-year total cost of ownership calculation produces the biggest surprises.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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The Italian constraint: Code of Conduct, EFPIA, GDPR<\/h2>\n

For companies operating in Italy, three regulatory constraints shape CRM requirements more than the three technology packages combined. The first is the Farmindustria Code of Conduct, last revised on February 21, 2025, which requires annual certification of scientific information procedures by February 28 through ACCREDIA-accredited bodies and redefines, with articles 3.25 and 3.26, the boundaries of activities toward non-prescribers and information to the public. Every message suggested by a Next Best Action system or by an AI agent must be classifiable as promotional or non-promotional and auditable retrospectively. The second is the EFPIA Code, which mandates transparency of transfers of value to HCPs and HCOs: the CRM must produce the annual disclosure for every interlocutor.<\/p>\n

The third is the GDPR-ePrivacy combination applied to professional health data: Italian HCPs require explicit opt-in for digital promotional communications, and the audit trail must be reconstructible years later. The EDPB’s 2026 coordinated enforcement action is focused on transparency and consent, and in 2025 sanctions in the healthcare sector grew by 26% compared to the previous period. Neither Vault CRM nor Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud solve these constraints out-of-the-box for an Italian company: both require a process and template configuration that is the real ground of the system integrator.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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December 31, 2029 is the date that weighs on the decision<\/h2>\n

The end of support for legacy Veeva CRM on December 31, 2029 is the time variable that conditions choices. It means that Italian and European pharmaceutical companies currently on Veeva CRM built on top of Salesforce must plan by the first half of 2027 which trajectory to follow, because the residual window for a complex migration \u2014 with regulatory validation, field training and data integration \u2014 is rarely less than eighteen to twenty-four months.<\/p>\n

The choice between staying on Veeva and moving to Salesforce is no longer played on vertical depth, which both players today cover at similar levels on basic functions, but on three axes that remain discriminating: the AI economic model for the next five years, the cohesion between the CRM and the rest of the technology stack already in place \u2014 Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, MuleSoft on one side, Vault Quality, Regulatory, Clinical on the other \u2014 and the maturity of one’s Italian system integrator in translating global blueprints into Farmindustria and GDPR constraints. The end of the duopoly does not make the choice simpler. It makes it, finally, a choice.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For fifteen years Veeva has held roughly 80% of the life sciences CRM market. Since October 2025 Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud has been in production and has already signed AstraZeneca, Novartis and Chiesi. Legacy Veeva CRM on Salesforce reaches end of support on December 31, 2029. For the first time in fifteen years, choosing a pharma CRM is genuinely a choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":35845,"menu_order":0,"template":"","insights_category":[968],"insights_tags":[876,969,875,877,874],"class_list":["post-35843","insights","type-insights","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","insights_category-ai-and-pharma","insights_tags-life-sciences","insights_tags-pharma-crm","insights_tags-salesforce","insights_tags-vault-crm","insights_tags-veeva"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/35843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/insights"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/35843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35844,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/35843\/revisions\/35844"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"insights_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights_category?post=35843"},{"taxonomy":"insights_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights_tags?post=35843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}