How dedication to data and the drive to deliver made Vertice AI-ready
Tony Cassidy, CEO and founder of Vertice, is a consummate entrepreneur. From his university days, when he founded his first company, to a series of successes that parallel industry evolution from business intelligence to data analytics to AI, Tony has applied his copious energy to seize the day on behalf of his customers.
Building a career on “what the business actually needs”
Oracle was part of his career very early on, starting with inclusion in large-scale Oracle ERP implementations, including a global scale deployment, where he then focused on financial reporting. He was excited by what he was learning and quickly realized that understanding finance was a real benefit in the world of ERP implementation. Understanding finance meant learning the business practice and the data, and connecting them to what people were doing—and why. It’s what inspired him to specialize in finance analytics, reporting, forecasting, planning, and budgeting. This was in 2000, when Business Intelligence (BI) was a new buzzword—one that would remain on the Economist Top Ten list for another 15 years.
Next, Tony went all-in and joined Oracle Consulting on an internal focused team, working on delivery of the first global single instance of Oracle Applications within Oracle. He worked on all the BI and analytics. “I worked at Oracle for three years, learning how the company operated inside and out, which became very valuable reference point as my career developed in the Oracle ecosystem. I learned a lot in a very short period.” Tony then brought his knowledge to the analytics community.
Establishing Vertice—the data’s the thing
Tony’s experience working on data and analytics helped form one of his core beliefs, that data is at the heart of customer value. That premise, along with a dedication to hands-on delivery and tangible customer value, was behind his founding of Vertice in 2010. Early project success in large customer organizations set the tone, and some became long-term client relationships that continue to this today.
In 2016, as business grew, Tony hired David Heraty as a computer science intern. Straightaway he got to grips with Oracle Analytics, working first with Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). “It really interested me because it was something completely new. Even though I was doing a computing degree, there wasn’t any specific business intelligence or analytics.” After graduating, David joined the firm full-time. While he was very hands-on with project delivery, he started to explore how customers were using BI to achieve business benefits and found himself gravitating towards explaining the benefits to prospective clients. Through a series of promotions, David is now Senior Commercial Director at Vertice, and at the forefront in building the company’s growth.
Hands-on success with Oracle Analytics
Over the last 16 years, Vertice has delivered analytics projects on Oracle technology to a wide variety of clients, from postal services, government, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, higher education, defense, retail, and energy. Click here for some examples.
Commenting on the success, Tony said, “We’re all practitioners at Vertice. We’ve all done delivery for clients. That’s why we’re successful. We have a culture of rapid delivery. And we couple that with a commercial understanding of time to value.”
That success is why Vertice has been steadily recognized for excellence. In 2018 they were the first Partner of the Year in Ireland, repeated in 2019; two years later, they were a Partner of the Year in the UK & Ireland. In 2024, they were the #1 EMEA partner for Modern Data Platform, and in 2025, the first Oracle AI partner certified across EMEA & APAC, and the first Fusion AI Data Platform certified partner Globally. From the original office in Dublin, Vertice has expanded with offices in Harrogate (UK), Lisbon (Portugal) and opening soon the USA office.
The maturity curve—new buzzwords, same dependency
Over the years Vertice has seen Oracle Analytics develop, from OBIEE, shifting to Cloud with Oracle Analytics Cloud, and working with Oracle Autonomous Database.
Everything still pivots on data. Tony explains, “Organizations have strong individual contributors and pockets of excellence, but struggle to assemble the composite capability needed for repeatable outcomes and operational deployment—data engineering, data governance, data security. AI won’t magically fix that, it’ll simply produce faster outputs that are harder to validate and easier to over-trust. It’s why you can’t move straight from experimentation to scale–and why we approach client projects by designing the data foundation properly, building in governance, and always, always making sure the work is tied to real ROI.”
The next wave—AI and analytics combined in Oracle AI Data Platform
In 2025, amid achieving new certifications and winning awards, Vertice became involved in the Early Adopter Program for Oracle AI Data Platform (AIDP). Tony immediately thought of healthcare and clinical data, because “clinical teams understand data better than just about anyone else we’ve worked with”—and also because Vertice has a long working relationship with University College Dublin, which has significant research groups including their Clinical Research Centre (UCD CRC).
Vertice collaborated with one group to build Oracle solutions for investigating trends in earth observational data, funded by Ireland and EU, Disruptive Technology Innovation Fund (DTIF). As that work concluded, Tony was approached by Colm McMahon, executive director for UCD CRC, who said, “We need to work with you guys again. We know you know data really well and we might look to some research around AI.”
Tony immediately took Colm up on the offer. Together, they developed the idea of using AIDP to help clinical trial patients with chronic respiratory disease better manage their condition, together with their clinicians. From scratch, it took three and a half weeks to deliver the pilot, which they presented at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas in 2025. You can read more about this project here.
Since then Vertice has been supporting UCD CRC to scale the project and its Innovation Library. Meanwhile, Colm and his team are moving quickly to establish an innovation hub. Their plans include deploying the Vertice solution approach to several more use cases and sharing the work and results with other organizations engaged in clinical trials, both in Ireland and internationally.
A practical AI takeaway for enterprise leaders
If there’s one thread that ties the Vertice-UCD-Oracle narrative together, it’s this: AI’s promise is real, but it is not self-executing.
“AI introduces new capabilities, new layers—but the fundamentals haven’t changed. If anything, AI has made the fundamentals even more important. Companies that win will be the ones with the discipline to manage their data well, to keep sight of risk, and that tie their work to specific goals – whether they do that themselves, or with Vertice.”
How you can learn more
Find out more about about Vertice, Oracle AI Data Platform, and the UCD CRC story on the Vertice website and in UCD’s AI World Oracle TV segment. You can also always ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community.