Stories about: Capital One

Thirty-eight people in the US and Romania have been charged in two indictments alleging they used complicated Internet phishing schemes to steal thousands of credit and debit card numbers, US and Romanian authorities announced Monday.

Climb the corporate ladder. Keep your eye on the ball. Pay your dues. A lot of the conventional wisdom about how to succeed in your career is sound, and the oft-recommended linear path upward frequently works well enough.

A decade of rapid growth has a way of making any cutting-edge enterprise feel outdated. But Rob Alexander, executive vice president of Capital One Financial, and his team rose to the challenge.

Data center managers have adopted server virtualization wholeheartedly in the past year, across a variety of businesses for nearly every kind of application, as a way to reduce oversight and hardware costs, IT managers and analysts said at Infrastructure Management World held this week in the US.

Virtualization has gone mainstream. According to The Yankee Group's 2006 Global Server Virtualization Survey of 750 businesses, 62 percent of respondents said they already had a virtualization solution in place or were in the process of migrating to one. Only 4 percent did not have plans to tap server virtualization.

Capital One Financial is reducing its server count even as it expands and acquires new businesses. To help make that possible, Lee Congdon, vice president of corporate technology at the US-based credit-card and financial services firm, is using virtualization in his servers and networks and piloting a database virtualization program.

Oded Noy had faced challenges before -- when he co-founded an application management startup, for instance, or when he participated in war game simulations for the Israeli Air Force. But this was unique: Create a scalable platform that would transform the online car shopping and financing experience for consumers -- in six months.

Chris Kniola wants to radically redesign his company's call centers. Instead of eight-pack cubicles -- the sterile setup of four desks in two rows, separated by low walls and equipped with standard desktop computers and phones -- Kniola envisions a free-flowing space that offers customer service reps everything from comfortable chairs to garden-side work spots. "You walk into the office, the security desk gives you your computer, and you go sit wherever you want," he says.

Embedding business intelligence (BI) into operational processes can help workers make better decisions, but such IT initiatives must be focused on an area that will show a significant return on investment and be designed with business users.

Capital One Financial is reducing its server count even as it expands and acquires new businesses. To help in that effort, the credit card and financial services company uses virtualization in its servers and networks and is piloting a database virtualization program. Lee Congdon, vice president of corporate technology at Capital One, said the company's goals are to reduce technology costs and improve the IT department's ability to meet business needs. Congdon also talked about the industry's role in spreading the technology.

IT vendors Monday rolled out a raft of new incentives aimed to propel the adoption of virtualisation technologies.