Publishing and education company Pearson has taken a unique approach to the ongoing enterprise cloud apps battle between Microsoft and Google: it is offering its 40,000-strong workforce the choice of either.

Pearson owns several well-known brands, including the Financial Times Group, the Penguin Group and Pearson Education, and its IT team serves staff in over 1,000 locations worldwide. 

The firm has overhauled its IT estate from Microsoft Office 2003 in the past two years, in order to ensure it maintained relevance with the new ways of working that its staff were embracing.

After evaluation it decided to offer its businesses units a choice of either Google or Microsoft Office applications, integrated together so they could be used between business units on a single platform, managed by the IT team.

To date 33,000 staff from just over 40,000 have been migrated to this new platform and Google’s services have been the overwhelming favourite, securing around 80 percent use over Microsoft’s offerings.

Graham Calder, chief technology officer for global platforms and services at Pearson, said numerous aspects of the Google technology have proved enticing to business units.

“We didn’t recommend what people chose, but it’s been interesting to see most have moved to Google after assessing the offering” he said. “There were a couple of swing factors that we’ve seen. One was cost, but another factor was the ability to transform the way people could work.”

One feature in this area of Google’s offerings – its video collaboration tool Hangouts – has been particularly popular. “Hangouts have gone viral. You rarely see people doing voice calls you just see Hangouts. They love the collaboration,” explained Calder.

Calder also said the firm is fully committed to a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy supporting all major platforms, although only two are used to any real extent. “Our primary base for BYOD is iOS, but the Android base has risen incredibly fast over the last year or so.”

The news comes on the same day that Orion Media has moved to Google Apps for Business, using cloud firm Ancoris to bring 200 staff over to its services.

“The key drivers were the need for more storage and more collaboration,” explained Jonathan Dean, IT manager at Orion Media. “There was no question Google was the best, most cost-effective solution. Google offered us much more storage than we could economically provide in-house.”

While this is good news for Google, last week Microsoft rolled out a number of customers that had ditched Google for its own service, as the two firms continue to battle for customers in the enterprise space.