You've found it – the perfect gift! As you plunk down your money for that Elvis Collectible Cookie Jar – the one with the figurine of the King leaning against his Harley – you smile, satisfied that your long search is over.
You call it day and head home, not realizing that your purchase has become part of a dynamic accounting and reporting exchange between the manufacturer of the cookie jar – the licensee – and the two licensors: Elvis Presley Enterprises and the Harley Davidson Motor Company.
Determining the royalty payments generated by your cookie jar purchase requires an amazingly complex calculation – one that must reconcile every parameter of the contract between licensors, agents, and licensees. Of course, yours was just one tiny transaction among millions involving these licensed merchandising giants. Harley Davidson generates about $150 million in annual sales of branded merchandise. And while Elvis may have left the building, the King of Rock keeps on rolling-in the dough through a worldwide merchandising blitz involving more than 100 licensees.
To keep it straight, both companies rely on software from the world's leading source of contract management and royalty accounting solutions: Counterpoint Systems, Inc.
The Counterpoint Success Story
Founded in 1987 by Robert Katovsky and headquartered in London, Counterpoint was a pioneer in providing rights and royalty management software for music publishers and record companies. Their Maestro range of products continues to lead the music industry today – and its success led Counterpoint to expand with Movie Maestro, a special application for the film industry.
Counterpoint consolidated its lead in recent years by acquiring two other companies: TL Creates – makers of the Pelican ProFiles line of contract management software for the booming brand licensing industry; and fresh ground software – a producer of search engines for publishers who are putting their catalogs on the Web.
Today, Counterpoint solutions are setting the world standard for rights management, royalty collection and distribution, and online and desktop catalog systems.• Their client roster includes a who's who list of household names in the entertainment and brand licensing industries, such as: 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon, M&M Mars, NASCAR, the National Hockey League, and the Major League Baseball Players Association.
• Counterpoint has captured 30% of the market for rights management solutions among the top 100 licensors in the world. Their closest competitor has only 7% of that market.
• Over 1,500 Counterpoint systems are operating in 42 countries – and the numbers keep growing.
Revelation Software Makes It Happen
From the beginning, and through all the growth and expansion, every Pelican ProFiles product has been written using Revelation's portfolio of application development tools.
Greg Helland, Executive Vice President at Counterpoint, says Revelation is the only choice. Helland has worked with Revelation products since 1982, and used them to create the Pelican ProFiles brand licensing software acquired by Counterpoint in 1999.
"Revelation has been our choice for developing our products from the beginning, mainly because of its flexibility and its robust nature," Helland explained. "It's extremely friendly and allows for very quick development compared to a lot of other languages. And having the multi-valued environment gives you a huge advantage over the ODBC compliant databases. It just works a heck of a lot better than everything else."
Multi-Valued Data Works Smarter – Not Harder
Helland gave an example of how important OpenInsight's multi-value capability is in the functioning of Counterpoint software solutions. "When you're talking about royalty calculations, you're talking about an extremely complex algorithm," he said.
"There are about 8,000 different combinations of royalties you can put on a contract. You can have escalating rates, de-escalating rates, rates by year, by price range, rates based on units or sales, or an if/then rate – for example, it's 10% of sales or 75¢ a unit, whichever is greater or whichever is less. It can change from year to year, or from renewal to renewal. It might be based upon a certain channel of distribution, or a certain territory, or a specific property. And then you have to combine that with how you determine any guarantees, and how the royalties earned in any given period accrue against the guarantee, or whether they go into what's called overage.
"So, you start adding these layers of data that allow you to function properly within the world of licensing," Helland continued, "and it gets very, very complex. We've seen royalty rate schedules that exceed 180 lines of data to figure out how to do something. And if you look at the entire database, there are over 10,000 fields of data that we're working with. That's huge."
And royalty calculations are just one component. Virtually every aspect of a licensing contract can be tracked and managed with Counterpoint solutions. And using Counterpoint, every party to a contract can exchange data and create reports.
Revelation for Future Growth
As Counterpoint continues to expand and they look to the future, Helland says Revelation is still their clear choice.
"We haven't really found anything that offers such a complete package," he said. "With Revelation, we get one package that's got a development language, a database, reporting facilities, communication capabilities, integration to the Windows API – all in one place.
"Whereas, if I go to an Oracle or a SQL Server back end, now I've got to ask 'All right –what am I going to use for the front end?' I'm going to use .Net or C# or Visual Basic, or Visual Studio, or Delphi – on and on you go. And then – 'Oh, what reporting tool am I going to use?' And there's a plethora of those. Then I need a database administrator to make sure that the database is always tuned correctly. You end up spending half your time getting everything to link up. Plus, the costs go up tremendously."
Helland says they always come to the same conclusion. "Every time we do something with Revelation’s OpenInsight – which is so integral to everything we do – we just realize how much easier it is to work with than any other environment."
So, next time you pull the lever of an Elvis slot machine, and you're hit with the realization that The King has been gone 25 years, remember – Revelation Software is still in the building.
Revelation NT Service and Advanced Revelation Provide Complete Foundation For Elite Spice’s Process Manufacturing Information System
Elite Spice finds the right blend with Revelation Software -- Thanks to Revelation NT Service and Advanced Revelation
Spices - they’re the common cooking staples that we use every day to make our meals tastier. Whether it’s a dash of paprika, a pinch of oregano, or even a couple of shakes of pepper, each cook uses his/her own intuition to add the right amount of flavor to a recipe and create the perfect dish.
However, during the processing and manufacturing of spice products, a far greater level of precision is required. Take, for example, black pepper. Numerous variables - flavor, granulation size, appearance, oil content, and more - combine to create a highly customized finished product with dozens of permutations. With more sophisticated spice blends and seasonings, the complexity is exponentially greater.
Elite Spice headquartered in Jessup, MD, is one of the leading industrial spice and seasoning producers in the country, supplying its products to the commercial food industry and private-label spice reseller/retailers. In business for 10 years, Elite Spice has earned a distinguished reputation as a full-service supplier of spices, spice blends, and seasonings, employing nearly 200 people at two modern manufacturing plants in Jessup, MD and Sparks, NV.
Precise Formulas and Specifications from a Seasoned Team
"Our products are highly customized," said Bob Cloney, director of MIS for Elite Spice. "Few - if any - are ‘off-the-shelf.’ We have to perform to our customers’ exacting specifications and provide for all of the subtle differences that they demand. Elite Spice’s manufacturing processes require extraordinary knowledge, planning, and coordination; and, Elite’s spice experts are its biggest asset. All of our products go through numerous processes before they are available for shipment to our customers. Our raw materials are mostly agricultural products, imported from third world countries, that must be cleaned, sterilized, and processed. Many combinations of grinding, blending, and additional processing are possible in order to produce a finished good."
Providing IT automation for this custom process manufacturing environment was not simple, either. According to Cloney, typical packaged solutions weren’t viable options. "Since our business is so highly customized, finding a packaged solution that could accommodate Elite was nearly impossible," he said. "We needed a custom-developed solution that would tightly integrate with our unique and successful business processes. With traditional commercial off-the-shelf software, you are often forced to alter your processes to fit the software. You can incur considerable frustration and expense while trying to adapt the software to suit your needs."
Elite turns to Advanced Revelation
Elite Spice selected Advanced Revelation from Revelation Software to develop its management information systems. Advanced Revelation is a comprehensive environment for creating efficient, powerful character-based applications using a native linear hash DBMS that is ideal for managing variable-length data and text-intensive applications. Its unique multi-value data structure means that a field can store a varying number of entries, without any pre-definitions of field sizes.
"The multi-value architecture of ‘ARev’ was ideal for helping us implement information systems that support our production model," Cloney said, "because our products are ‘multi-valued’ as well. A seasoning, for example, might have a blend of spices or sub-seasonings."
According to Cloney, any finished product is capable of having many sub-products, components, and compounds. "When developing a product, we may not know what the final composition will be, so a dynamic and flexible database like Revelation’s linear hash is perfect for us. Compared to other alternatives, I was able to build more manageable solutions with fewer tables and less complexity. Virtually every automated process in this company has been built with tools from Revelation Software - customer service, manufacturing, accounting, product development and sales are all supported by a variety of integrated software modules developed with ARev and most recently OpenInsight. More than 50 users in both manufacturing locations currently access these applications."
Faster Performance with Revelation NT Service
Recently, Cloney migrated the ARev system to a Windows NT server. Since Advanced Revelation was developed well before Windows NT was released, Revelation Software created The Revelation NT Service to enable ARev applications to run more efficiently on a Windows NT Server. The Revelation NT Service increases application performance 30-50 percent and virtually eliminates Group Format Errors. Best of all, it is a "drop-in" solution, requiring no changes to the ARev application.
"Elite has enjoyed considerable growth and we are now processing millions of pounds of spice products each month. To alleviate the strain on our information systems infrastructure, we deployed Windows NT Server, Symmetrical Multi-Processor Hardware, and Revelation Software’s SMP-aware NT Service. We’ve been getting some terrific performance increases with the NT Service," said Cloney. "We’ve seen anywhere from three to four times better performance - and that increase in performance has held steady even as the number of concurrent users was increased. The NT Service also offers us the opportunity to scale our ARev and OpenInsight applications to a level that would not have been possible before. It was well worth the investment."
Sprezzatura and The Unites States National Weather Service
"There's an old joke about a Revelation database having a half-life of plutonium," says Andrew McAuley, President of The Sprezzatura Group, one of the world's leading Revelation System Integrators. "Of course, that's actually a compliment. When you've made a major investment in a database application and your entire operation has come to depend on it, then naturally, people want to stick with it. That's why many of our clients are still using DOS applications we helped them build using Revelation as far back as ten or even fifteen years ago."
But what about when you need to take that ol' tried and true DOS application, put it up on the Web and open it up to the wide world of Windows? Time to scrap it and start all over? No way! With Revelation's OpenInsight, those beloved legacy applications are reborn with full Web and Windows functionality.
Sprezzatura – Making Databases Happen
Internationally recognized as leading Revelation Software experts, the Sprezzatura Group has worked with hundreds of businesses and large-scale enterprises to develop database solutions and guide them onto the Web with OpenInsight. And true to their name, they always make it look easy. (Sprezzatura is an old Italian term describing the art of completing difficult actions with a nonchalance that belies the difficulty.) Sprezzatura's history goes all the way back to 1983, when dinosaurs roamed the Silicon Valley and the first Revelation product was introduced. Based in London, Sprezzatura has grown to become an international service with offices in Australia and the United States.
To appreciate the value of Sprezzatura's expertise, and to understand why Revelation is their chosen platform, consider the case of one of their major clients, the U.S. National Weather Service.
NWS: From Sneaker-Net to the Web
Everyone makes small talk about the weather, but there's nothing small about the work of the National Weather Service (NWS). As the primary source of weather data, forecasts and warnings for the United States, NWS is a critical resource for decision-makers in agriculture, transportation, power, construction and other industries. And when you're talking about accurately forecasting hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, you're talking about matters of life and death.
NWS uses sophisticated radar systems, satellites, computer models, and high-speed communication networks to carry out it's mission. Keeping it all running are 4,800 employees working from 156 field offices and over 200 support offices, powered by a budget of nearly $750 million per year. Planning and managing those hard-earned taxpayer dollars is a huge job in itself – and that's where Sprezzatura and Revelation come in.
Back in 1988, NWS undertook a multi-billion dollar modernization program that introduced new technologies and reorganized field offices. “Implementing the changes they were attempting required intensive budget planning,” McAuley explained. "Plus, they had to bring in new staff to handle the new technology. With people and equipment spread out in hundreds of offices and stations around the country, building a detailed budget from the bottom up was a real challenge.”
To do it right, NWS needed a dynamic budgeting application that would let them enter all the costs for upgrading a weather forecast office, and then easily recalculate everything and keep it all in sync as the inevitable changes occurred on the project. They tried to do it with a spreadsheet at first, but quickly exceeded its capacity.
NWS decided to create their own budget database application, and they chose to build it with Advanced Revelation (AREV), the award-winning development environment for DOS. The main attraction was AREV's MultiValue architecture. McAuley points out that "MultiValue architecture lends itself very nicely to budget applications. You can easily put together all of the data you need, and then just as easily generate any kind of report you want. And of course, it's very flexible and easy to change. "
Back in early days, NWS relied on a "sneaker-net" system to shuttle disks back and forth between regional offices and headquarters. By 1997, their budget application proved so successful that management wanted to expand its use beyond the modernization program to encompass the entire NWS budgeting process. Sneaker-net wasn't going to cut it anymore, so the time had come to put the application up on the Web.
But can you get a legacy application with a DOS database to integrate with Windows? You can if you're using Revelation Software!
Sprezzatura and Revelation Make It Easy
NWS contracted Sprezzatura to help them move onto the Web. "NWS did something smart," Andrew McAuley remembers. "They said, 'Our database does exactly what we need it to do, and our staff is quite happy using our familiar DOS application. So don't rewrite it in Oracle or anything else. Just use it as is, and move it incrementally towards Windows and the Web.' You can do that with Revelation.”
"One of the things that sets Revelation apart as a database is that the file structures employed by the DOS package are identical to the file structures employed by the Windows package," McAuley explained. "This means that while some people are still using the DOS based system, the new users are on the Windows based system – but they're all using the same data. It's not like we're duplicating or data warehousing it. They're actually taking the same data and using it at the same time. Traditionally, the big problem with these legacy-based apps is you say 'OK, we're going to rewrite this for you in Windows, and we're going to come back in and cut off the DOS based system.' But with Revelation, the DOS and the Windows version share data. I think that was the attraction for NWS – that they could incrementally move forward towards Windows, instead of having to do everything in one fell swoop."
Flexibility is another key benefit of a Revelation database. "It's a dynamic database," says McAuley, "and it can be dynamically added to or subtracted from as you're using it live. So when we worked on the web enablement for NWS, if we needed to update the application by adding extra fields or columns into the database structure, we could just keep using the system as we were developing on top of it. That meant there was no down time or complicated database maintenance. It just continued working as we added to it – and that always makes the client happy."
Sprezzatura and Revelation have been keeping clients happy for over 20 years. And with flexible solutions like OpenInsight, they'll keep them happy for many more years to come.
Making the Great Migration with OpenInsight
"It all made sense at the time," says Fran Whitley, Director of Administration at the North Carolina Real Estate Commission, looking back with only a trace of irony still lingering in her voice.
In 1998, after years of smooth sailing with the database application they built using Revelation Software's Advanced Revelation, it was time to make the move to Windows and get on the Web. The advice from the experts du jour was "Make the switch. Move over to the big-name platform. It'll be a big upgrade."
Five years later, the upgrade was most definitely not "up." Instead, it was stuck in a series of unfortunate events with a plot as twisted and dark as a Lemony Snicket novel. Only this time, there's a happy ending – thanks to OpenInsight from Revelation Software.
Keeping it Real in Real Estate
The North Carolina Real Estate Commission (NCREC) has a big job to do. "We're an independent state agency," explains Whitley, "and we handle licensing and regulatory oversight issues for the real estate industry in North Carolina. Our primary activity is issuing and renewing licenses for real estate agents, which involves everything from administering the exams, to approving the schools that offer prelicensing courses, to offering our own continuing education programs for licensees. We also serve as a consumer protection agency, so we provide information to the public about working with real estate agents and we investigate and prosecute consumer complaints."
Keeping it all straight requires a robust database application capable of generating a wide variety of reports. "We have in excess of 220,000 licensees in our database – about 89,000 of which are active," says Whitley. "The record for each individual licensee is really like a personnel file. We know where they are, who they're working for – all the information we need to know on a daily basis. Plus, we can also track complaint histories, keeping any information about a complaint that may have come in on a licensee."
The complex nature of each file is why they chose Advanced Revelation (Arev), in the first place. Arev's flexible MultiValue architecture makes it easy to combine and control any type of data, and generating reports is a breeze. "We have to generate all kinds of reports, in addition to what's used to manage the license registration and renewals," says Vickie Crouse, Data Processing Administrator at NCREC. "For example, we have a complaint tracking system that prepares detailed reports for our investigators to use. Those files contain everything from the original complaint by the consumer to status reports from the investigation. It's complex information, and Arev handled it beautifully."
Right Idea – Wrong Approach
Eventually, the time came for upgrading the NCREC database so it could easily be deployed across multiple workstations in their office as well as on the Web, giving the public on-line access. That meant leaving the DOS world of Arev and migrating to Windows.
"We took a look at everything out there," remembers Whitley, "and the people we were working with recommended that we go to Oracle. Unfortunately, that didn't work out very well at all. It was supposed to take 12 months – but actually, the whole process took us a little more than five years! And the worst part is that it never did work correctly. There were networking and compatibility issues that never got straightened out."
The series of unfortunate events included software bugs, 12-hour marathons to set up a single workstation client, and loading delays that s-s-s-s-slowed the whole system to a crawl.
OpenInsight – The Right Choice, After All
With not much to show for five years of effort except a lot of expense receipts, the NCREC team went back and took another look. This time they came right back around to Revelation Software's Windows-based system: OpenInsight. OpenInsight offers enhanced features for application building, along with improved networking, data manipulation, and error handling – all of which adds up to greater security and lower maintenance.
The decision was made to start over in OpenInsight, and it couldn't have been any easier. Within six months, their new Windows based system was up and running – fully functional, no muss, no fuss.
Patsy Fegenbush, an independent Revelation consultant, was brought in to help NCREC with the migration to OpenInsight. "It was a very smooth process, and very quick. For example, data transfers that had been taking two days were now getting done in 90 minutes – max. I remember Vickie calling me when she first moved the data over, saying 'This only ran for an hour or so. Is it supposed to be that short? Oracle was taking two days. What's the problem?' I told her there was no problem, because the data was already stored in the format it needed to be in. With OpenInsight, you don't have to manipulate the data, you just move it straight over."
Why Choose Anything Else?
Ok – so OpenInsight was easier and faster to implement than the big-name brand. But what's the catch? Surely, you must be giving up some functionality in exchange for simplicity, right?
NCREC's Software Engineer, Vincent Miranda says no – they didn't give up anything. "With OpenInsight," he explained, "we can do everything we need. For example, we now have an online renewal system, where the agents can use a credit card to renew their licenses. Well, we have to tie that back into OpenInsight to get all the data from the web transferred over to the office database – and that's easy to do."
OpenInsight comes with great features – and great service. Miranda said, "The Revelation training team was wonderful. We attended their seminars, and it helped us understand the infrastructure and the design of the system and how we could use OpenInsight for a smooth migration." And beyond that, "There just isn't much maintenance required," Miranda said. "It's doing really well."
Patsy Fegenbush agrees. "OpenInsight is easy to work with, and it's user-friendly – for clients, as well as for me, as their programmer. Also, with Oracle, you really need to have an in-house database specialist – in OI, you don't. And it's a very short training period compared to Oracle."
"Our OpenInsight system has been in place for six months now," says Vickie Crouse, "and it's doing wonderfully! So, in the end, Revelation has really worked out better for us."
Rock solid reliability. Complete flexibility. Why choose anything other than OpenInsight?
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