>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. We are theCUBE virtual and I'm your host Keith Townsend. Today I'm joined with Melanie Frank who is managing VP of technology at Capital One. Welcome to theCUBE Melanie >> Thanks for having me glad to be here. >> So first time on theCUBE, but you guys have done something big at Capital One. So we're not going to take it easy on you. This is, this has been hitting the news cycles. You guys have closed down your last data center. What spurred the, the initiative for Capital One to exit to private data center. >> Oh, there's so many cool technology, you think that we'll talk about, but you know, if you want to talk about why that is not tech for the sake of tech in this case, this is about working back from, from what our customer needs are. So I think of how the digital world has transformed our expectations as consumers, right. I, I actually was, I use a digital assistant a lot in the kitchen. And so the other day I was cooking and, you know, I update a shopping list to set a timer. I'm just used to doing those things. And the other day I actually asked my digital assistant to set my stove to 350 degrees, which I do not have a smart stove. It's not integrated with my digital assistant, nothing in my home has that capability right now, but it really kind of struck me as a wow, this whole, like this, this interaction has changed my expectations now for my entire kitchen. And I think that those types of experiences now are what we've come to expect as consumers. And that really was the center of it for us, our shift to cloud and exit of the data centers was all about our ability to provide our customers with experiences that are real-time and intelligent that you just can't do, if you're running on outdated technology in a data center. >> So I absolutely understand the benefits of when you're there. The other day, I was bringing up another circuit in our data center and I'm thinking our virtual data center and I'm thinking, wow, man, this is so easy. I can just issue a command software defined. And now the data centers has redundant connectivity, but getting there is a process can you talk to us about the process and how long it took for Capital One to actually reach that goal. >> Yeah, you know, you're so right. Like it is so nice once you're there, but it is not to be underestimated the, the transformational aspect of this, so this was a part of a massive eight year technology transformation, really. That was about modernizing the way in which we worked as well as the tech infrastructure itself. So our goal was to get to this destination where we were faster and more nimble, like you described with those new capabilities for those customers. But we're talking about this eight year transformation where we transformed our talent. We had to hire product managers, data scientists, designers. We shifted our developer skill sets. We're now sitting at an 11,000 person tech organization with 85% of that being, you know, engineers, we shifted the way we work to agile, is it is just much more conducive to that rapid delivery of value. And then of course, on the tech side, really since about 2014, we've closed eight data centers and rebuilt thousands of applications to take full advantage of the cloud technology and capabilities. >> Cool. So it goes without saying, you guys won the world's biggest financial organizations and you've highlighted the non-technical part of the journey. Can you provide a little bit of insight for us on the, kind of the, your partners within the bank, not just technologists in the technology organization, how was this not necessarily disruptive, but changing, you know, groups like audit your financial services. You're constantly worried about audit. How did audit embraced this change? >> Well, I think there was a huge learning for the entire organization to think about what, what parts of what we do need to be done differently. In some ways there were a lot of benefits if I think about our business partners in the finance team where, you know, you had a data center running with massive amounts of technology infrastructure, perhaps you had to size that technology infrastructure for your peak loads, for us during, you know, holiday shopping periods and things like that. And now we're at a position where we can much more nimbly control the tech. We can audit scale up, we can audit scale down that is much more cost-effective for us, for our business. And then from a financial perspective, you just take that use case for the finance department it's, you know, adjusting so that we can directly show that cost to the line of business and allow them to make the changes that they need, which makes sense for their business and their customers. >> So let's talk about more of that process and the journey from a technology perspective, as we look at something as mature as a bank's infrastructure, not all of those applications can be migrated easily and re-platformed easily. How did you guys deal with those tough last to move application, you know, that last 20%? >> Yeah. I think, you know, it early with that, for us with a declaration that, you know, kind of I'll say the easier part, anything new gets built into the cloud. And as you point out that is way easier than tackling some of those things that you you've probably been dealing with and tackling for a very, very long time, from an application standpoint. We knew early on that it would be better if we could modernize the applications themselves as we moved them to the cloud to really kind of unlock the advantages because there's one part of the advantages of the cloud infrastructure. There is a second part of what it forced was a application modernization and a tech modernization for us. And so those two things together were super powerful. We had a few stubborn ones that we said, okay, can we containerize this? Can we lift and shift this over it's, to me, it was likening to, you know, moving from one house to another and you've, you're kind of cleaning out your attic and you're trying to figure out, ideally, you don't take anything to the new house that you don't need and you do all this cleanup. And at some point you say, well, this I'm going to put in this box and I will deal with it kind of at the new house. And ideally you do that before you put it right back in the attic. So we had a few of those, but in large part, you know, 85%, I think that's, that's part of why it took us so long was let's, let's do this right. And let's get, get this so that these applications can run effectively and take full advantage of the cloud. >> So let's talk about some of the potential benefits and the past eight to nine months. My relationship with my commercial banker, with my private banker have really changed due to the pandemic. Talk to me about some of the advantages or capabilities the bank has gained as a result of moving all almost all. Well now totally to the public cloud. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. I think I'll start with one that is a little bit more technically oriented then talk about the capabilities. So, you mentioned the pandemic and we had, you know massive amounts of planning as we were kind of taking in the full impact of what was about to happen for our associates and our customers, you know and trying to think through how will customer behavior change during a pandemic? We didn't have a whole lot of indicators as to what that might look like. You know, how is their activity going to change from a transactions, for example, or, you know, are they going to change the frequency with which they're logging in online or paying the cloud gave us the flexibility. As you mentioned earlier to scale rapidly in case the projections that we were making were wrong about consumer behavior. And so we could keep the platforms up and running and recover them much quicker, more resilient infrastructure to make sure that it's up because we really we're in unprecedented times, trying to think through how, how behaviors and needs of customers would change. Secondly, you know, from a capability standpoint, we talked about the need for those real time intelligent experiences that only cloud can give you only modern applications can give you things like, you know Eno, our digital assistant, which is built on a streaming architecture, it can identify unusual charges, 40% tip and alert me in real time. You know, these days 40% tip, I'm trying to help local businesses, that's, that's exactly true. But the fact that Eno is out there kind of looking out and watching my back and saying, this is unusual is, is this you you're transacting a lot online who knows what the fraudsters are looking for. It's those types of experiences that, that you can't build. If you are posting transactions to a mainframe that, you know, runs a batch process overnight, it doesn't help me if you tell me the next day. >> So let's talk about this talent transformation a little bit too, because one of the most difficult things I've witnessed with any type of, of massive transformation like this is recruitment and retention of talent, not the industry hasn't quite built up the talent pool to support such massive transformations. How is this impacting your talent and recruitment processes? >> Yeah. So, massively. And the good news is, you know, given the amount of time we've been on this transformation, we had some time to allow that to adjust, you know, when we started and knowing that, that we were focused largely on AWS, we said, we'd be great if we could go find it, you know thousands of engineers who are, you know, deep experts in AWS, and they didn't necessarily exist at the time given that there, there aren't a whole lot of companies doing what we were doing at the time besides perhaps, you know, AWS themselves and Netflix and they're good partners to us. So we don't need to, to steal everybody's talent. And so we started early on with training and re-skilling our engineers, generally speaking, I find that engineers love using new things. And they in particular love learning newer technologies. I haven't found one yet who's kind of resistant and, you know, wanting to go back and learn COBOL or Fortran like I had to. And I was in college. So, you know, the fact that, that they could, could learn some of these modern tech help evolve and develop them, you know, really kind of push on, on some of the capabilities and, and partner with partners like AWS to enhance the capabilities that are out there. And that's, that's an engineer's dream. The fact that they had, we had plenty of time. We made the declaration that we were going to go all in on cloud. Well, before we targeted getting it done probably before we even knew how in the world we were going to get there, it gave folks plenty of time to think through the training. We provided massive amounts of, of access to learning and training certifications of, for, for everyone to develop the skills that they needed. And I think it's just been great and super fun from a talent perspective. >> I love that you mentioned Netflix, they've been another company that's been extremely public with their journey to the cloud. We kind of think of Netflix is just born in the cloud company and they weren't, and they had a journey to the cloud you share your journey to the cloud. What are some of the pieces of advice, the best practices you can give other companies looking to take that similar journey? >> I will say to, you know, not underestimate the transformative part, for us I think I've said it before. I'll I will say it again. This was not just a tech transformation, you know, this started with our customer needs. It started with a business strategy. It was transformative to our culture for how we, how we think about building and delivering capabilities, as well as the software, then that underlies and supports them. And so I think, you know, starting from a place of where are you trying to go and why? And giving yourself really the fortitude and commitment to achieve it, because you mentioned it, it is not necessarily easy. If you run on a yearly budget cycle, you if, unless you are, you know, running on very few applications at this point, you know, you will not get this done in kind of one year budget cycle, this is a multi-year journey. And ideally you're changing the technology itself, but also how software gets delivered. And therefore then as we just talked about the talent required to do so. >> So Melanie, we've been watching your journey for the past couple of years and we so appreciate you sharing your journey with theCUBE. More importantly, you're now a CUBE alum, and you get all the benefits of the CUBE alum, which has a great headshot that the team has shared, but we really appreciate you sharing a builder's journey at this builder's show. Stay tuned for more coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 via that you.. virtual. Thanks for joining us. (gentle upbeat music)