 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at Splunk.com 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Splunk. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Hello everyone, welcome to The Cube. We are live here in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's The Cube. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. And we're excited to be live on the ground here in Las Vegas for Splunk Conference. The hashtag is Splunk.com. Join the conversation, go to crowdchat.net slash Splunk.com, we have all the thought leaders all recording in our engagement application there. My co-host this week is Jeff Kelly with Wikibon Lead Analyst in Big Data. And our next guest is Lee Cogniz, CIO of Red Hat. Here on The Cube, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, glad to be here. Great to have you on The Cube. First of all, I love Red Hat, obviously with the Red Hat Summit, it was amazing. The guests we had and how Linux has really won. We all know that, we're all proud of it. Linux has continued to win. Open source has continued to win. And now you have kind of a new animal on the block here. This hybrid platform tooling stuff that's emerging. Splunk is one example of many others. This new cloud model, the new data model. It's really transforming IT as a CIO. And Red Hat, which is cutting edge. What's your take on all of this transformation? I mean, it's new, there's new freemium models, expansion strategies, the costs are lower. What's your take on all of this? So it's a great question and a lot of ground to cover, but just starting with open source. I think that open source has in fact won and we'll continue to see open source expand in a lot of different environments because it's so well suited to the enterprise environment. You've got a situation where you've got folks that want to contribute, that are passionate about being part of the open source movement and participating in open source communities. And you've got enterprises and other organizations that need to solve business problems. So the great thing about open source is those communities can come together and people can solve their business problems, contribute it back to the community, get the recognition for doing that, get the stability and the security benefits of multiple eyes on the code and feel a great sense of accomplishment and be recognized by their peers, by their company, by their vendor partners and so on. So I think it's a very synergistic model and it really has been great for us and as you say, it's starting to become more and more visible in other business models. More broadly, IT is really the way businesses are going to be run in the future. It's going to take a while for the organizations to evolve and some organizations evolve differently and more rapidly than others, but the reality is we are moving from an industrial society to an information-based society and whether that's the Internet of Things, whether that's gathering more information about your customers, whether that's utilizing mobile apps to understand more about your business, the reality is we're all in an information business now and it's really a lot of fun for those of us that have been in IT for a while to see it becoming so core to the heart of many of these exciting new enterprises. So Leah, I want to get your perspective because you have a unique position at Red Hat because Red Hat really took open source, made it bulletproof. You have SLAs that span a decade now with the customers, so you've got the mindset and grain in your head around that kind of reliability and stability, industrial strength, whatever you want to call it, but the modern era of big data and Jeff Kelly's study points out that IT's not getting a good grade from the business units with all this modern stuff. Now it's embryonic, so as an IT guy also who has a mindset of the Red Hat culture, things aren't always perfect and as they're growing, you have to be mindful of making sure things are working properly. How does an IT executive out there deal with the hyper growth of these new tools, new platforms, certainly adding value, but is there a worry factor on the newness of stuff? Well, there's a worry factor, but there's also a great opportunity. So the challenge you face in IT right now is if you try and manage the stuff that's been traditionally yours, keeping the doors open, ensuring information security, upgrading apps and operating systems periodically and so on, you can do that flawlessly and become less relevant to your business over time because of this information expansion we were touching on a moment ago. And so as a consequence, if you do that, you may in fact have a job and even a career, but you will be less and less relevant to the mainstream of your organization. I think the more astute IT organizations are looking ahead and realizing that, yes, the 70 or 80% of the work that we do that's run the engine in nature, we need to execute flawlessly. We don't get any credit for that. If the email server's done, you got a big problem. If the email server's up, nobody sends you an email saying, great job, the email server was up today. And that's the reality of the IT job. But where you can really make an impact and make a difference is the 30% innovation driven, new business opportunities, the fact that you understand more about the business than many of your business partners because you see all the business processes in many cases. So being able to step up to that, let your business partners drive it, let them take the credit in many cases. But at the same time, being a leader in your organization and driving next generation IT is, I think, incumbent on all of us. And that's how IT organizations and IT jobs are going to change going forward. If you don't do that, you'll be confined to less relevancy. Your business partners will do it without you. And then somebody in the future is going to have to pull everything back together because it is an IT driven world. So we have some commentary and some engagement on CrowdChat right now. I want to ask you then the questions coming from the crowd. Tim, great to see you on the engagement container we have out there with CrowdChat. So Tim says, is IT really looking to become a superhero still? Question mark. And he says, the point of view is if IT is looking to become a superhero, they have the wrong focus. And then I responded, this is like blow by blow. IT should be invisible and frictionless. The value is on the business success and employee productivity. What's your comment on that? That thread brings up the point you were just talking about is, it's not about flexing the muscles of IT at an individual superhero. It's really about the overall success. How do you deal with that dynamic? Yeah, it's great. It's great to be able to demonstrate that you can take a crisis and fix it, but that doesn't add long-term business value. What you need to be thinking about is, your enterprise's strategy, what your unique strengths are, and by enterprise, I mean the business or the enterprise, not just IT, and how you and IT can contribute to that. Doesn't mean you have to be silently in the background. Doesn't mean you don't get credit for it, but at the same time, if you are solving IT crises, you're probably not moving the business ahead. So you need to be partnering with the sales organization to make them more productive, or the marketing organization to make them more effective, or the product organization to make your products better rather than simply doing traditional IT things. You should, in fact, expect credit for that and recognition for that, and you should expect to partner across your business, depending upon your corporate culture, but I don't think IT wants to position themselves as the superhero, but they also don't want to position themselves silently in the background either. So Jeff Kelly did a study, Jeff, I'd like you to weigh in on this, and this was a little bit different, but similar area around Hadoop, where he did a survey, and IT gave themselves great grades. Oh yeah, we're kicking ass, you know, check. Looking through, we got the Hadoop cluster up. The business guys were like, well, not so good. So the grades are coming back, so this collision between IT and business units is a real dynamic, and certainly it's a positive outcome when it works together. So what's your comment on that connection? How does IT and the business come together? Jeff, you want to weigh in? Get free to. Well, I'll just add to that. It seems to me that IT, certainly they're playing the role of helping stand up new systems and new technologies, adopt new technologies, whether it's Hadoop and SQL, or things like Splunk even, to make better use of your data, but there's that, as John said, we're seeing that gap between the IT and the business side who actually, you know, they want to move the business forward through better insights from their data, delivering more value to customers. So, and you just talked about doing just that from an IT perspective. So take us a step beyond, all right, standing up systems to help you use data more effectively, things like Hadoop and SQL, Splunk, more analytic databases, et cetera, but actually tying that to business outcomes from an IT perspective, how do you actually bridge that gap? That's a great question. You need to be able to free up resources from your run the engine baseline, that 70 or 80% we touched on, to enable your business partners to be more effective and to enable you to assign resources to the business to make them more effective. They're going to pick their own priorities. And if you get into a negotiation about service levels or yeah, we can get to that project in two years from now, increasingly you're going to be falling behind because the velocity isn't really rapidly accelerating. So what you need to do in IT, in my view at a minimum is figure out your own saves that you can reinvest both in making IT better because you've got to be good enough, but in addition to that, free up people so that when the business says, gee, I'd really like to put a new website together, a new redhead.com in our case, we can put our arm around our marketing partners and go off and figure out what we need together without a lot of disruption, without a lot of gnashing of teeth around the budget discussion and so on. And when we identify what's traditionally called shadow IT, I think you need to think of that as an opportunity as this is important enough to the business to devote resources to it. So therefore, let's pull it into the fold, let's manage it more professionally, let's take advantage of our expertise, let's make sure it's secure. Those are benefits and business-driven IT is where IT organization should be looking for opportunities to invest. That's where the business has already started to invest. Well, to your point that your advice to IT organizations to focus to 20 to 30% of your time are really providing value to the business versus the 70% of the time which is kind of keeping the lights on and the more traditional IT things, does that suggest that, you know, why not delegate those things to a cloud service provider or somebody like AWS to do those kind of things? What's your take on that? I think it's absolutely the direction we should be heading and we should be thinking going forward about taking advantage of these new technologies to shift the percentage even more to driving business innovation. So rather than driving toward a, we're going to get the baseline better and better and better and we're going to maintain our legacy posture, you also have to be retiring your legacy technology debt as rapidly as you can afford to do so so that that number over time goes 20, 30, 40, 50 and you're spending the bulk of your activities on things that drive business value for your enterprise and increasingly you're relying on trusted partners to deliver software solutions, to deliver cloud solutions, to deliver analytic solutions for you so that you are focused on your unique understanding of the business and where you can deliver business value. Lee, thanks for coming on theCUBE but I want to ask you about Splunk because you're just a conference is all about data is everywhere, I love the comment, oh it's on the floor, it's over here, I mean it is everywhere and we commented on theCUBE, Jeff and I were talking with Dave Vellante and said mobile first, great, cloud first is now the buzz but no one's talking about data first. So what is the Splunk opportunity and how does that helping IT and what are some of the things you're sharing here with Splunk case study? So I'd say two things, I mean Splunk is obviously great at managing unstructured data and the types of data we and IT deal with all the time but increasingly that data is going to become pervasive outside the IT organization whether it's coming off of machines, whether it's things that aren't traditionally in IT like mobile apps that are going to start flowing in. So I think a combination of building on their core expertise which we've had great experience in the operation space, the information security space, the application development space and identifying those additional use cases for marketing, for operations, customer support, for sales and so on driven by unstructured data are both great opportunities for Splunk. Lee, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I know you're super busy and love that you're a CIO and at Red Hat you bring a great perspective and look forward to seeing you at the next Red Hat Summit. Absolutely. To drill down on DevOps and all the cool stuff that we could probably talk for another hour. We could certainly talk for a long time. Great to have you here. We're live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks.