In the late 1980's IDT was founded by a team that still remains in place more than 20 years later. That team’s unique combination of skills, acquired through years of experience in database management technologies and direct marketing, benefit IDT and its clients with a cross-pollination of knowledge gleaned from a diversity of industries, challenges and solutions.

The team had recognized that marketers across most industries were awash in information but unable to harness its power. Data quality was lacking. Systems containing source data were silo'd. Software implementations were expensive – particularly those dedicated to data warehousing – and many marketers found that a cleansed, well-organized database underlying the software was non-existent. The interfaces that served as the users’ window to the database were anything but user-friendly. Finally, the burden for putting the data to work fell to the end-user.

That recognition focused the team on developing a technology that would allow source data, emanating from different source systems and in a wide variety of formats, to be integrated in a data model organized meet needs and requirements. The mantra: "Flexibility and customization within a standardized data model."

The team also began developing a user-friendly query interface – an OLAP tool as some would call it – to support marketing end users in putting the database to work. The mantra: "Make it easy and efficient for non-technical end-users to get what they need from the database."

The marriage of technical skill with marketing experience resulted in the early version of what would become the IDT Guest Management System.

Of almost equal importance was the companion development of a library of hundreds of proprietary processes for cleansing and maintaining data – postal hygiene; matching and deduping records; consolidating and summarizing information in source records; enriching source data with new, summarized variables related to customer lifetime consumption; appending demographic and lifestyle data elements.