The earliest Customer Data Platform systems were introduced before 2010; the term CDP was coined to describe this emerging class in 2013 . My definition had changed very little when we launched the CDP Institute in 2016, and has been the same ever since: “packaged software that builds a unified, persistent customer database accessible to other systems”. The Institute added the RealCDP checklist * in 2019 to attach more specifics to the definition in the hopes of helping buyers ensure a system that called itself a CDP could actually support the use cases they expected a CDP to support. By then, industry analysts were beginning to offer their own definitions which, while worded differently, were broadly consistent with the Institute definition. Even the major marketing suite vendors, who initially argued a separate (“persistent”) database wasn’t necessary, eventually discarded that position and introduced products that matched our criteria. A successful concept like CDP quickly takes on a life of its own.…