Speakers: Vijay Karthik, Senior VP and CTO, Neiman Marcus Group; Sriram Vaidyanathan, Vice President Omni Engineering and Services, Neiman Marcus Group & Justin Honaman, Head of Worldwide Consumer Products & Retail GTM, AWS

In this session, Vijay Karthik, Senior VP and CTO at Neiman Marcus Group, discussed the company’s retail journey to the cloud and their ongoing digital transformation. As part of their cloud strategy, the Neiman Marcus team had to rethink how it structured its development organization and challenged the legacy mindset around solution development. Specifically, programmers needed to adopt a cloud-first mindset and learn a more agile way of working. According to Sriram Vaidyanathan, vice president of omnichannel development and engineering at Neiman Marcus, who also participated in the panel discussion led by AWS’s Justin Honaman, being agile is essential if you’re going to support a rapid pace of innovation. “To actually put this in place you need to have the right foundation. You need to have the right foundational team to be the custodians of the cloud,” Vaidyanathan commented.