| Good morning, Marketer, and what’s in a name? I have been covering the stop-start CDP stories of large-scale marketing suites for what seems like a decade. But it’s probably only been three or four years. Partly because Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce in particular built their suites through acquisitions, centralizing customer data for execution across all parts of the suites became a pressing challenge — especially as the independent CDP space continued to grow. Everyone needed some kind of CDP to underpin their multiple clouds. And I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with the aforementioned vendors (and you can add SAP to the mix) about whether they should call it a CDP or something else. Some of the nomenclature adopted by Salesforce around their “360” branding (Customer 360, 360 Audiences, 360 Truth and so on) could be confusing. And now they are launching a hyperscale data platform called Genie. The name is new, but how new is the platform? We’ve reached out to Salesforce for comment.. Kim Davis
Editorial Director | 