Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, helping organizations, including 90% of the Fortune 500, run mission-critical workloads across hybrid cloud, automation, Linux and beyond. But even in a highly data-driven marketing organization, teams trying to answer performance questions and find insights were slowed by fragmented information across dashboards, documents, spreadsheets and internal tools. To solve this, Red Hat built the Marketing Insights and Navigation Engine (MINE). Powered by an open hybrid cloud foundation (Red Hat OpenShift) and integrating Databricks for advanced data engineering and data management, MINE is a marketing intelligence platform that gives marketers seamless access to trusted answers, enabling them to navigate performance data and move from insight to action faster.
From fragmented data hunting to precision marketing
Red Hat’s marketing team needed to move faster, but the information marketers relied on was distributed across many systems. Campaign performance lived in dashboards. Definitions and process guidance lived in documentation. Pipeline, account engagement, and attribution context often had to be stitched together manually. The challenge was not simply finding data, but finding trusted, contextualized marketing intelligence that teams could interpret consistently and act on quickly.
"Before MINE, decision-making was slow and fragmented. Marketers had to navigate multiple dashboards and tools to find what they needed, then manually combine campaign performance, account engagement and pipeline impact across systems. Without a centralized place to clarify terms like marketing-sourced pipeline, leads and campaign attribution logic, teams had to rely on documentation or reach out to others for answers. "—Rutanshu Desai, Principal Data Scientist, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
To solve this, Red Hat’s data science team worked directly with marketing stakeholders to identify the highest-friction workflows. After running 20 focus groups, the team identified common pain points around dashboard navigation, metric definitions, campaign analysis, and frequently asked questions.
“We started with real pain points from our stakeholders and built around the friction of finding accurate information across siloed locations.”—James Noe, Manager of Data Science, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
Those insights shaped the creation of MINE, Red Hat’s Marketing Insights and Navigation Engine: an internal platform that gives marketers a conversational way to find trusted answers, navigate dashboards, understand metrics and access the right resources without deep technical expertise. Because MINE was built around real user needs, it became more than an experiment. It became a trusted tool designed around how marketers actually work.
For Red Hat’s marketing organization, the value became clear in day-to-day decision-making. MINE gives marketers real-time access to pipeline trends, segment performance, top-performing offers and lower-performing engagements, helping teams identify patterns and adjust strategy faster instead of waiting for quarterly reviews or relying on ad hoc requests.
“The beauty of MINE is that it’s real time. I can quickly see where we are with pipeline, how segments are performing, what offers are driving results and where we need to change our investment strategy.”—Leigh Day, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Red Hat
The OpenShift advantage: security, scale, and flexibility
To drive adoption, MINE had to feel trusted, familiar, and transparent from day one. The team recognized that simply using standard application hosting features would not meet Red Hat's rigorous enterprise standards for security, governance, and architecture control. Instead, the team hosted the MINE frontend and application logic on Red Hat OpenShift, utilizing it as the core hybrid cloud foundation.
Deploying to OpenShift provided multiple advantages and overall flexibility:
Seamless identity integration: OpenShift allowed the team to integrate MINE directly with Red Hat's internal Single Sign-On (SSO) and VPN infrastructure, ensuring a frictionless yet highly secure gatekeeper for users.
Environment separation: OpenShift enabled the strict architectural separation of pre-production and production environments. This allowed the data teams to test new data pipelines and dashboard integrations in a sandboxed pre-prod cluster before promoting them to production, ensuring zero disruption for marketing users.
Enterprise-grade control: OpenShift provided the proven, flexible application platform Red Hat customers and internal users already knew and trusted. It managed the complex orchestration, scaling, and network security policies of the application layer, seamlessly connecting to the powerful data engine running on Databricks.
“We overcame skepticism with transparency by demonstrating repeatable, governed results. With Databricks on the backend and OpenShift on the frontend, we could show marketing stakeholders exactly where an answer came from and why it was consistent. We didn’t give them a black box; we gave them a secure engine they could trust.”—Preston MacDonald, Senior AI Engineer, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
Building MINE on Databricks: a unified data management layer
Red Hat built MINE by utilizing the Databricks Platform to unify data engineering, data warehousing, and analytics in one seamless location. Moving away from disjointed databases and siloed information, the architecture embraced the Databricks Lakehouse model. This allowed the Red Hat team to process, clean, and manage massive volumes of structured marketing data and unstructured documentation within a single, governed ecosystem.
“Databricks provided the data intelligence toolkit we needed to support the underlying data infrastructure for MINE. We had the foundation to build, support, and store all types of data including user-defined functions, unstructured data in Volumes and online tables within a centralized Lakehouse architecture, completely streamlining our data pipelines.”—Preston MacDonald, Senior AI Engineer, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
Unity Catalog serves as the central pillar of data management and governance for MINE. By leveraging Unity Catalog, Red Hat established a unified location where all data access, history, and lineage are managed seamlessly. It allowed the team to govern data tables, establish strict access controls, and manage the structured and unstructured assets that power the platform.
“Unity Catalog is a key foundation of trust for MINE. It provides centralized governance, verifying that when MINE generates an answer, it only draws from data that the specific user is authorized to see. Beyond access control, Unity Catalog enables lineage and versioning, which allows us to trace any insight back to its origin.”—Shraddha Sutar, Data Scientist, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
With Databricks handling the complex data engineering, governed data storage, and unified management layer via Unity Catalog, the lean data team could focus less on fragmented backend infrastructure and more on delivering high-quality, trusted data to the OpenShift-hosted frontend for marketers to consume.
“Databricks provided the unified governance and data intelligence we needed to turn fragmented data into a trusted, scalable system, successfully moving from a laboratory experiment into a production-ready reality that our marketers actually trust.”—Shraddha Sutar, Data Scientist, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
Business impact: faster decisions, more self-service and stronger collaboration
MINE has delivered measurable productivity gains for Red Hat’s marketing organization. Using real query volumes, user engagement and time-in-motion studies, Red Hat calculated that MINE improves time-to-insight by 70%, saving an estimated 34,000 hours annually by reducing the time marketers spend searching across dashboards, documents and internal systems. Applying a conservative junior marketer hourly rate, the team estimated $1.3 million in annual productivity value. Because MINE is used by marketers at multiple levels, including senior leaders making high-stakes decisions, the team believes the full business value is likely even higher.
“A key driver of the 70% improvement was giving users one centralized interface to access both data insights and documents. This significantly reduced the time spent switching between tools, tabs and multiple resources, helping users find the right information much faster.”—Rutanshu Desai, Principal Data Scientist, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
For Red Hat’s CMO, the broader impact is organizational agility. MINE gives teams self-service access to performance patterns, helping them continuously identify what is working, spot underperformance and adjust campaigns, nurture programs or investment decisions faster. That has reduced repetitive requests to marketing operations, while giving global teams a shared view of performance.
“MINE levels the playing field. Everyone is looking at the same information, pulled from consistent sources, refreshed in real time.”—Leigh Day, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Red Hat
Just as importantly, MINE has strengthened the partnership between marketing and data science. Using in-app feedback, Jira workflows and ongoing stakeholder reviews, Red Hat’s data science team continuously improves MINE based on real marketer needs. That collaboration has helped the team move from responding to one-off data requests to building a shared marketing intelligence layer that scales knowledge across the organization.
“We’ve moved from being a data-only team to living in the room with our users. We’re not just building for marketers; we’re building with them.”—James Noe, Manager of Data Science, Marketing Analytics, Red Hat
Beyond productivity, MINE is strengthening marketing’s credibility inside the business. By making trusted intelligence accessible to every marketer, Red Hat is reinforcing that modern marketing is measurable, technical and grounded in data. As MINE becomes part of everyday decision-making, marketing teams can move with more speed, precision and confidence.
“Marketing is a science. It is formulaic, technical and drawing from data just as much as other parts of the business. MINE is helping prove that.”—Leigh Day, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Red Hat
What’s next for Red Hat
To expand on the current success of MINE, Red Hat is exploring ways to embed this governed marketing data into additional business tools and workflows. By maintaining a strict focus on robust data engineering and single-source-of-truth governance via Unity Catalog, Red Hat is designing a blueprint for how enterprises can scale data intelligence without sacrificing security or accuracy.
As MINE becomes more connected to execution, Red Hat sees new opportunities to measure downstream business impact, including click rates, revenue influence and campaign performance improvements. For CMO Leigh Day, the goal is to improve customer experience, make better investment decisions and help Red Hat’s marketing organization operate with greater precision.
“We want to make sure we are always putting our customers first: finding what they need, understanding their challenges and serving them the best way possible.”—Leigh Day, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Red Hat
Acknowledging the team behind MINE
MINE was built by Red Hat’s data science and marketing analytics team in close collaboration with marketing stakeholders across the business.
Core contributors: James Noe, Preston MacDonald, Rutanshu Desai, Shraddha Sutar, Greer Homer and Rylee Sweeney