Ardent Leisure CIO out after rejecting Sydney move

Ardent Leisure tech chief Paul Young has left the company after baulking at a forced move away from his Gold Coast home to Ardent's new leadership base in Sydney.

Paul Young

Young had been CIO at the listed entertainment business since September 2014, but has now taken up a work as a consultant.

A spokesman for Ardent said the group was “consolidating” its group IT leadership team to Sydney “as part of an ongoing strategic review of group IT systems”.

“As a result of this change Paul Young, the current CIO based on the Gold Coast, has left the group to pursue other opportunities,” he said.

Young told iTnews his family is settled on the Gold Coast and he did not want to move them.

He is now "assessing his options" for his next career move but will "take a wee breather" before making a decision.

It is understood another, less senior, staff member also left the group amidst the office switch.

Ardent Leisure Group operates a raft of entertainment venues like Dreamworld, White Water World, ten pin bowling franchises, and laser tag sites.

Young has also held CIO jobs at accommodation giant Wotif.com and engineering outfit Ausenco.

During his stint at Ardent, Young oversaw the migration of a significant suite of applications to the AWS cloud, a re-architecting of the enterprise’s IT environment, and a network refresh.

He shifted the business to between a half and a quarter of all its infrastructure into the public cloud, and said he was particularly proud of the "cutting edge" DevOps capability he leaves behind.

"The team and I have done a lot," he said.