What this series decodes
MarTech has a naming problem. Every few years a new acronym appears, vendors rally around it, and buyers are left guessing whether it marks a real capability shift or just a new label. This series takes one acronym at a time and traces the full arc: the problem it originally solved, the market that shaped it, how vendors stretched the definition, what it means architecturally today, what it gets confused with, and whether it still earns its place.
It opens with one lineage told in three movements. ESP was the send engine. MAP bolted a lead lifecycle on top of it. CEP broke email's monopoly and made the channel just one output of a behaviour-driven decisioning layer. Read together, they explain why nobody can cleanly tell a MAP from a CEP from a CDP anymore.
