Paddy Power plans tie-up of product and technology teams

09.12.2014
Paddy Power has appointed a new chief product officer with the aim of bringing together technology and product development teams across its organisation.

Former managing director of Paddy Power online and technology, Peter O'Donovan, will be tasked with leading a newly created product function that combines expertise from Paddy Power and its software and gaming business Cayetano in Bulgaria.

The technology department of the firm's Sportsbet business in Australia will also have a 'dotted reporting line' into O'Donovan.

Meanwhile, Johnny Hartnett will take over as managing director for Paddy Power's online division, having previously employed at the firm as director operations.

"These appointments reflect a strategic emphasis on customer and product," said chief executive Andy McCue, who took over at the firm in September.

"I am delighted to be filling these positions with high calibre individuals with a proven track record of success in the group."

Paddy Power has invested in improving its delivery of technology services in the past year. This has included deploying AppDynamics software to monitor application performance and aid developers in improving user experience. It has also cut the time taken to upgrade applications from weeks to hours with the rollout of Opscode's Chef automation tools, helping to simplify configuration and deployment of server resources from its data centres running on a CloudStack platform.

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Matthew Finnegan