Computer veteran caught by the Net

Another day another city. For 30 years Brian Cassidy has been circling the globe and hitching wagons to his train of technology successes. Now, the Internet presents itself as his latest challenge.

The energetic Tyrone man has been zipping in and out of Ireland recently finalising plans for his next great production which will be staged here, and he's looking for Irish software developers to spearhead the first subsidiary of his Seattle-based company, Live Content.

So what's new? Another software company looking for staff these days is generally best advised to take a number and join the queue. But Cassidy has a strong story to tell. In previous lives he has been the mathematician on the team that developed Tagamet the billion dollar ulcer treatment drug, one of the pioneers of SQL database language, the franchise holder for Oracle Europe and the Middle East, and a majority shareholder in Saros Corporation, a leading document management vendor.

After studying applied maths at Queen's University in Belfast in 1969, Cassidy developed his taste for travel on a year-out tour of the world. A bit baffled as to his next course of action he took advice from a physicist who recommended he try "this new thing called computers". One year later, armed with a Masters degree in computer science, Cassidy joined ICL in England, and working under Nobel Prize winner, Prof James Black, he helped develop the first billion dollar drug, Tagamet.

Once Prof Black moved on, he chose to travel further afield, and joined a Danish company. There, he and Tom Pederson began a long term partnership installing IBM databases for the governments of emerging economies.

"I was his Man Friday. He was the foot-in-the-door sales guy and I was the techie. We did a lot of work in Peru and Kuwait, where I met my current business partner, Bo Ryden. Eventually we got tired of working 15 hours a day all over the world, and decided it was time to go back to Europe and consolidate," Cassidy says.

In 1980 the Scandinavian labour rates were sky high due to government regulations, prompting Cassidy to search for a tool to give them a competitive advantage over their competition. The solution had just been developed in IBM's laboratories, and it heralded the next revolution in database technology. It was relational databasing written in SQL language.

Recognising its business potential, particularly the advantage to clinical research, Cassidy set about finding a small company specialising in this field. His search brought him to a start-up company in San Francisco called Oracle. Cassidy and Ryden returned with the distribution rights to Oracle in Europe and the Middle East.

"There were only 12 guys there then, headed up by Larry Ellison and Bob Miner. They were just hanging out trying to get their stuff together. Larry and I became good friends, he knew that we had lived through start-ups before and trusted us to do a good job, much to the annoyance of big companies that sought the rights later."

Cassidy, Ryden and Pederman put all the money they had made in their previous jobs into developing Oracle Europe. Starting from Denmark they penetrated every country, and watched Oracle's revenue grow from $500,000 in 1980 to $550 million in 1990. Along the way they swapped the distribution rights for substantial stock and the title Oracle Corporation Europe. Describing his job initially as that of a prosletyser for SQL, he gradually cracked the pharmaceutical industry which embraced it on a grand scale. In 1987, they set up a dedicated software development centre in Ireland. Today, Oracle employs 500 people in Dublin.

Cassidy ended his relationship with Oracle in 1990, exactly 10 years after it had started. "Because the technology was quite difficult to pitch I had become the grand old man of Oracle, continually being wheeled out to do Billy Connolly type presentations worldwide."

His long-time friend, Ryden, left with him, and they began checking out other little software companies to see what they could unearth. Cassidy was particularly interested in the area of enterprise document management, where all of a company's files and documents can be stored, accessed and manipulated online. They found what they were looking for in a company called Saros, and immediately took a 22 per cent stake.

Saros' founder, Mike Kennewick was an early member of the Microsoft team, recruited in to take the burden of software licensing deals off Bill Gates, who was still trying to cover everything himself. Cassidy took an active role in Saros as vice-president of business development, and eventually sold the company to one of his clients, FileNet for $130 million (£92 million) in 1996. The previous year he sold on another investment, Internet company, Netwise to Microsoft.

Despite his best intentions to hang up his boots, Cassidy had been seduced by the Internet, prompting him to establish Live Content in 1997. The Seattle-based company specialises in information management software on the Internet, and its products would be typically suited to anyone using the Internet as a research vehicle. Now the 22 developers in Seattle have produced its first two products, "iorganise" and "ireport", which should be ready to ship by the end of the year. Cassidy envisages a range of related products.

The decision to locate in Northern Ireland is not born of any misty-eyed hankering after the green hills of home, but is more a case of the right place at the right time. Members of Northern Ireland's Industrial Development Board were scheduled to travel to Seattle this week to conduct a process of due diligence, and Cassidy envisages between 15 and 20 people being employed in Belfast or Derry by the end of this year. "These jobs are on the very limits of Internet technology which makes it exciting for any developers with C and ActiveX/COM experience. We will also be offering attractive stock option packages to our people."

Already an impressive stable of industry big names have assembled at the upper echelons of the company. Taking care of branding is Rowland Hanson, the man who named Windows, Office and Word. The vice-president of marketing, Rich Abel, who launched Windows 3.0, and Scott Briggs, ex-president of Ziff-Davis, the dominant publisher of home computing media, sits on the board as a non-executive director. Last week, Premiere, a US telecommunications company specialising in unified messaging systems, invested $4 million in Live Content as part of a strategic alliance for the future.

Cassidy is in no doubt he is on to a winner with Live Content, in fact he sees the opportunities presented by the Internet as boundless. "After 27 years in this business, right at the end when I think I've seen it all, the single biggest change in computing comes along. Take away the hyperbole, the Internet will still be the biggest transformation tool for businesses everywhere. If they don't catch on to the Internet now, I believe they will fail."