The study was aimed at understanding how the cloud performs differently from an on-premises environment, said Josh Whitney, corporate sustainability strategy lead with WSP. Using a methodology aligned to the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI) standards, Accenture and WSP compared the energy use and carbon emissions per user for Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM with their cloud-based equivalents: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The results suggest that for widely deployed and commonly used applications such as e-mail, content sharing and customer relationship management, the cloud can enable significant reduction in carbon emissions.