 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 re-invent 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 gonna take it easy on you. This has been hitting the news cycles. You guys have closed down your last data center. What's for the initiative for Capital One exit to private data center? There's so many cool technology you think that we'll talk about, but if you wanna talk about why it is not tech for the sake of tech in this case, this is about working back from what our customer needs are. So I think of how the digital world has transformed our expectations as consumers, right? I actually was a user digital assistant a lot in the kitchen. And so the other day I was cooking and I updated a shopping list or 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 integrating 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 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provide our customers with experiences that are real-time and intelligent that you just can't do if you're running on outdated technology in a data center.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, no, you're so right. Like it is so nice once you're there but it is not to be underestimated 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 engineers. We shifted the way we worked 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. So it goes without saying you guys one of 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 your partners within the bank not just technologists and technology organization. How was this not necessarily disruptive but changing groups like audit, your financial services, you're constantly worried about audit. How did audit embrace this change? I think there was a huge learning for the entire organization to think about 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 and the finance team where, 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 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 auto scale up, we can auto 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 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 replatformed easily. How do you guys deal with those tough last to move application at last 20%? Yeah, I think it started early for us with a declaration that 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'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 move them to the cloud to really kind of unlock the advantages because there's one part of the advantages of the cloud infrastructure. But there's a second part of what it forced was an 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? To me, it was likening to moving from one house to another and 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 points 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, 85%, I think that's part of why it took us so long was let's do this, right? And let's 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. In 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 almost, 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 than talk about the capabilities. So you mentioned the pandemic and we had 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. 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. How is there activity going to change from a transactions for example, or 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 were in unprecedented times trying to think through how behaviors and needs of customers would change. Secondly, 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 Eno, our digital assistant, which is built on a streaming architecture. It can identify unusual charges. 40% tip, and alert me in real time. These days, 40% tip, I'm trying to help local businesses, that's exactly true. But the fact that Eno's out there kind of looking out and watching my back and saying, this is unusual, is this you? You're transacting a lot online. Who knows what the fraudsters are looking for? It's those types of experiences that you can't build if you're posting transactions to a mainframe that 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 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 has this impacted your talent and recruitment processes? Yeah, massively. And the good news is, given the amount of time we've been on this transformation, we had some time to allow that to adjust. When we started knowing that we were focused largely on AWS, we said, we'd be great if we could go find thousands of engineers who are deep experts in AWS. And they didn't necessarily exist at the time, given that there aren't a whole lot of companies doing what we were doing at the time, besides, perhaps, AWS themselves and Netflix, and they're good partners to us. So we don't need to steal everybody's talent. And so we started early on with training and rescaling 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 wanting to go back and learn COBOL or Fortran like I had to when I was in college. So the fact that they could learn some of these modern tech, help evolve and develop them, really kind of push on some of the capabilities and partner with partners like AWS to enhance the capabilities that are out there, and that's an engineer's dream. The fact that they had, with 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 access to learning and training and certifications 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 as this 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 not underestimate the transformative part. For us, I think I've said it before, I will say it again, this was not just a tech transformation. This started with our customer needs. It started with a business strategy. It was transformative to our culture for how we think about building and delivering capabilities as well as the software, then that underlies and supports them. I think 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, unless you are running on very few applications at this point, 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, that 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 the Q. More importantly, you're now a CUBE alum, and you get all the benefits of the CUBE alum, which is a great hashtag that the team has shared, but we really appreciate you sharing a Builders journey at this Builders show. Stay tuned for more coverage of AWS re-event 2020 via the Vue Club virtual. Thanks for joining us.