Google had a viral video on The Story of Send. Google just released a post that fits in the same theme with what could be "The Story of Google Apps."

The blog post is backed up with a paper.

The data that gives this story credibility is the win Google had for Google Apps with the US GSA.

Lower energy use results in less carbon pollution and more energy saved for organizations. That’s what happened at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which recently switched its 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government. We found that the GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%. That means the GSA will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs alone, a 93% cost reduction.

The specifics of the GSA story are here.

It wasn't too long ago that any small business that wanted e-mail was seriously looking at putting an e-mail server on site. What small business does that now? Along with that came Office licenses. Google is targeting this whole Office document e-mail system with cloud services that are much more efficient.

A typical organization has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilized. And our data centers use equipment and software specially designed to minimize energy use. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.

All of this is built on Google's green data centers.

We’ve built efficient data centers all over the world, even designing them in ways that make the best use of the natural environment, and we continue working to improve their performance. We think using the super-efficient cloud to deliver services like Google Apps can be part of the solution towards a more energy efficient future.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure

(Cross-posted on the Google Green Blog)