Jaguar Land Rover is to roll out the Google Apps online collaboration and productivity suite to 15,000 staff.

The car maker's chief information officer Jeremy Vincent said his approach to IT has been changed by learning more about the cloud.

"Six or seven months ago I didn't know what cloud computing was but I was invited to speak at a conference on it so I thought I had better learn. I did and it fundamentally changed my attitude to IT and I started to preach the gospel wherever I could. I've been recruited on a change agenda and needed something to raise my flag," he said.

"If you do the same as everyone else don't expect to be better than anybody else. [Cost] enabled me to get the approval process signed off quickly but in the future it will give us access to a commodity solution across the workforce. "

The deal follows hot on the heals of big wins for Google with Rentokil Initial for 35,000 users and the University of Portsmouth for 30,000 students.

The agreement was announced at Google’s Atmosphere conference in London today.