Paddy Power to move to Windows 10 but is still deciding between Office 365 or Google Apps

CIO Fin Goulding heaps praise on Microsoft for starting to listen to customers more since Satya Nadella took over the CEO job

Bookmaker Paddy Power is to move to Windows 10 despite having only shifted to Windows 8 last year, but has a decision to make on its choice of office collaboration tools, CIO Fin Goulding told Computing at Splunk Live in London last week.

Goulding explained that the company moved to Windows 8 quite quickly and will also upgrade to Windows 10 swiftly.

Unlike some end users, such as Nottinghamshire County Council, the firm was not surprised by the decision of Microsoft to release Windows 10 so soon after the launch of Windows 8.

"We realised the the usability shift from traditional Windows 7 to 8 was difficult without touch devices, which is what Windows 8 was designed for... but if you used Windows 8 in a corporate environment, most people shifted to the traditional Windows 7 style [desktop] so you weren't getting the benefit of it," Goulding said.

Although the firm has decided to go with Windows 10, it hasn't yet determined which office collaboration tool it will use going forwards.

"We have the on-premise traditional Microsoft Outlook stack and the tools around it, but we've decided that as corporate cloud has become pretty big for us we [are revamping] our day-to-day email collaboration systems," he said.

"We're negotiating between Microsoft and Google; Google have got a great product set in terms of their enterprise apps and Microsoft have come up on the rails with [Office 365] with quite a surprise in terms of usability and flexibility. It'll be interesting to see how Skype for Business works for collaboration, as that's something Google have got a robust solution with Hangouts," he added.

Goulding also believes Microsoft's strategy to make its user interface consistent across all its platforms could be an advantage for Paddy Power.

"Now [the UI] is unified across all its platforms, so you build once and deploy to Xbox, Windows desktop and Windows mobile, so it's quite smart [although] it has taken them a while to get there, so I think it will be an advantage for them and can be an advantage for us," he said.

He also believes the software company has improved the way it communicates and reacts to customer needs in recent times.

"I think the whole world of Microsoft is changing, they seem to be listening to customers more and becoming less of a ‘we are the big software provider and you will do what we say' and they are actually responding more to what customers are looking for in terms of flexibility which is interesting and that's down to the new CEO... I've never seen a shift like it, in the last six months there are solutions which [suddenly] fit our needs more," Goulding said.

He added that he liked the way the firm was moving away from big releases and adopting Apple-style small incremental updates.