The UK’s largest food company has chosen to drop IBM’s Lotus Notes in favour of Google Apps for Business.

Premier Foods, which owns brands including Hovis and Mr Kipling, will move its 5,000 users across to Google’s productivity and collaboration suite later this year. This includes email, spreadsheets, word processing, instant messaging, voice-over IP and cloud storage.

According to Mark Vickey, the company’s group information services and chage director, the primary driver is to improve collaboration across its various sites in the UK.

"We have cross functional and cross geography teams working them whole time,” he said. “This causes a huge amount of inefficiencies, both in terms of traveling, but also in version control on documents and getting access to the most up to date information.

"Being able work on that collaboratively, at any location on any device is hugely powerful for us.”

Vickery gave the example of engineers at its 40-plus factories sharing energy saving improvements. “If we are making changes at our Worksop factory, the level of communication required to find out that those changes would benefit our Liften factory at the other end of the country is quite challenging. You probably don’t even know the name of the engineer, let alone what they’re looking at and what they’ve done. Being able to bring that together is huge.”

Vickery said that moving to a cloud service provides an “opportunity to reallocate the resources – license costs, server hosting, support and maintenance – into more productive areas”.

Premier Foods is working with integration partner Appsbroker to move its existing email and calendaring systems onto Google’s platform, using the migration platform which Google provides to enterprise customers.

Yesterday, Google announced that Google Apps for Business earned ISO 27001 certification, an internationally accepted security standard.

Eran Feigenbaum, director of security at Google Enterprise told Information Age that he had received emails from Google’s sales and marketing reps saying that having the ISO27001 certification would make it easier for them to position Google apps to enterprise clients.