Apparently Marvel’s making a bit of a fuss over moving over to the Oracle E-Business Suite for keeping track of what characters are licensed to who and for what purposes. Unfortunately, the article I read was a bit confusing and I had only the vaguest idea what it meant. I turned to Murray to see if he could make sense of it, since he handles this databasing stuff for a living and, even though he thinks it’s not worth posting, he put enough work into it that I feel like I gotta share. Seriously, it’s not an amazing thing worth talking about save for the fact that this sort of indicates that Marvel either can’t keep track of what’s going on right now or they’re seriously planning to license the living hell out of their oft-referenced library of thousands and thousands of characters.

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It ain’t really that newsworthy!

Right now, sounds like they’ve got a bunch of rinky-dink systems managing all this stuff that aren’t connected to one another. (Just my guess)

Now, in any large organization there’s going to be cases of left hand not knowing what right is doing. For example -

Marvel licenses me Brother Voodoo so I can make posters of him (I’ll use Voodoo b/c I’m sure his rights aren’t as carefully monitored as Spider-Man) for the fee of $1000 a year until 2010, at which time our contract ends. Likely they have right now:

System A - a record that Murray Roach can use Voodoo for posters for $1000/year until 2010 (keeps track of the contracts)
System B - a system that invoices Murray Roach for $1000/year for the right to use Voodoo
System C - a system that makes sure Murray Roach has paid his $1000/year for the rights to Voodoo
System D - a system to track how many Voodoo posters a year Murray Roach (and other guys who’ve purchased the license) are producing
System E - a system that’s sort of marketing/accouting combination to mash data and say “Murray Roach is making $100,000 a year on these Voodoo posters…we should be asking him for $10,000 a year, not $1,000 when his deal is up.”

Etc, etc, etc.

Right now, chances are good that all those things are rinky dink systems that have no knowledge of one another. So, deal could’ve expired but I’m still making posters. I’ve gotten an invoice every year for the past 5 years, but I haven’t paid them a dime. I’m using Voodoo on t-shirts, video games, action figures and making 20 billion a quarter on him and Marvel’s getting none of that.

From Marvel’s perspective, getting a suite of tools to handle all the systems their business depends on is a worthwhile investment b/c once it’s in and working as they require, they will ideally be able to see everything they require and have a better handle on managing their business. In theory, this sounds great - but it’s a bitch to implement, and when everything is married like that if you have on tiny screw up you could throw everything out of whack.

Spread the word!