Google Calculator Gives Insight Into Cloud Cost-Cutting

Google yesterday unveiled the Go Google cloud calculator, a free tool that Google said demonstrates the benefits of "going Google" within enterprises. Solution providers can leverage the calculator to illustrate for clients the potential time and money savings a cloud computing environment could realize.

"Sometimes it's hard to imagine what working in the cloud would really mean, and frequently, people ask us how they can better understand the benefits of Google Apps specifically for their business," said Google Apps representative Vivian Leung in a blog post. "How would online collaboration really affect your workplace? And how could increased email storage or integrated IM and video chat actually impact your company’s productivity?"

The calculator asks users to plug in their business name and number of employees and highlights where companies can find money and time savings when moving to a cloud computing infrastructure.

For example, using the Go Google cloud calculator to measure cloud effectiveness for a 100-employee company, the calculator estimates that company could save more than $30,000 per year with Google Apps; add more than 2,000 GBs of e-mail space; save nearly 3,000 man-hours lost to spam e-mails; add nearly 3,000 hours in productivity gains annually; avoid losing 60 GB of data and spending more nearly $300,000 recovering lost or stolen data; and save $15,000 in data recovery services.

All told, the calculator estimates a 100-employee company can save $329,095 and 5,581 hours annually by going to Google's cloud. Meanwhile, companies of different sizes can equally save time and money taking on a cloud infrastructure, Google said.

From there, the tool creates a custom URL, presentation PDF, spreadsheet and a poster that IT managers can share with decision makers or solution providers can show potential cloud customers.