Let’s be honest with ourselves, this was never just about software.

If you’ve made it through parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series, you’ve seen how most organizations don’t run on a single CDP, but on a patchwork of tools that reflect team priorities, governance gaps, and the relentless pressure to just keep moving.

The industry has started catching on. In the July 2025 CDP Institute Industry Update, David Raab offered a sharp summary of where we’ve landed:

“The term CDP has become a catch-all that includes everything from CRM-lite orchestration tools to complex,

You can tell a lot about a company by how it answers one deceptively simple question: Who owns the CDP?

Not the license. Not the roadmap. The actual thing. The model that sits between what marketing wants and what the data team tolerates. The implementation that touches consent flags, event structures, identity graphs, and half a dozen teams trying to ship something yesterday. The reality is that ownership, when it exists, is rarely stable. It shifts and changes shape over time as initiatives develop, teams restructure, or priorities float between the many others on people’s lists.

Across the last