DeWITT — Critical Link, LLC expects increasing amounts of revenue in the coming years from its own line of products.

The firm began in 1997 working with customers on ground-up development of advanced computing components. Along the way, it developed its own line of processors that are now key components in everything from wind turbines and medical products to industrial instrumentation and quality-control technology.

About a quarter of Critical Link’s revenue comes from its products with the remainder generated from its continuing contract work for clients on product development and engineering. The goal for the next few years is to flip that ratio, says Thomas Catalino, vice president and a co-founder of the company.

“It’s an exciting time for us,” he says. “We’re in a market that’s growing. More and more customers are heading this way with their designs. The market has kind of developed alongside of us.”

Critical Link began developing its line of processors around 2004 to help address overseas competition for its services-based business, Catalino says. The product that resulted, known as the MityDSP, helps customers take advantage of the increasing computing power made possible by technology from firms like Intel and Texas Instruments (TI).

The firm released the latest product in its line, the MityARM-3359, in May.

The type of component Critical Link designed has been growing in popularity over the years. That means more competition, but also more opportunity, Catalino says.

The company is bullish on the prospects for its products in part because of the close relationship it cultivated with TI, he adds. The firm is one of about two dozen companies around the country designated as platinum members of TI’s Design Network.

The group represents the TI’s elite-level design partners, Catalino says, and the relationship is providing a strong boost for Critical Link. The partnership also helped connect the company with some of the leading catalog distributors in the semiconductor space, including Mouser Electronics, Digi-Key, and Avnet.

“Customers are now able to just go on the Web, find our product, click buy, and grab it,” Catalino says. “They’re going all over the world.”

Critical Link’s products now routinely wind up as far away as Europe and China, he adds. The relationship with the catalog distributors is also helping the company tap into industry sectors it wouldn’t have accessed as quickly on its own.

The company employs about 30 people and is looking to add three or four more in the coming months, Catalino says. The firm, he adds, is just at the beginning of its growth potential.

And while product revenue is expected to grow, it won’t come at the cost of the company’s service business, Catalino says. Its product sales will simply make up a bigger overall slice of total revenue.

In fact, product sales can drive more contract work since clients often need help with designs based on Critical Link’s processors.

Critical Link declined to disclose its revenue total.

Catalino founded Critical Link with John Fayos, Omar Rahim, and David Rice. All four founders are still involved with the company. The firm is based in a 12,000-square-foot office at 6712 Brooklawn Parkway in DeWitt.  

When New York lost out two years ago on federal funding for an ambitious, statewide effort focused on developing companies and new technology in the energy-efficiency space, organizers could have simply walked away.

Instead, the group of more than 100 partners, led by Syracuse University (SU), decided to press ahead. The first phase of their plans is now becoming a reality. The state last year awarded the effort, known as the New York Energy Regional Innovation Cluster, $3 million as part of the Regional Economic Development Council initiative

The innovation cluster project was a key piece of Central New York’s proposal for the regional council initiative, which awarded $200 million in competitive funding and a total of $785 million. Central New York’s plan won $103.7 million.

The $3 million for the innovation cluster will go toward outfitting the Syracuse Center of Excellence with new labs for research and testing of products. The total cost of the project is $8.7 million, with the remainder coming from federal grants and private funding, including money from SU.

Some of the technologies studied in the labs could include fuel cells, combined heat and power systems, smart-grid applications, photovoltaic-power generation, wind-power generation, and battery storage. The initial state funding will also add new transportation infrastructure at the center, including a special parking surface outfitted for testing stormwater-management technology and charging stations for electric vehicles.

The work the partners put in while developing the proposal for federal funds convinced them the state has the resources to be a major player in the energy-efficiency space, says Edward Bogucz, director of the Syracuse Center of Excellence, which will serve as a hub for the innovation cluster. 

“We were enthusiastic about the team we put together,” he says.

The center and its more than 200 collaborators at companies and institutions throughout upstate New York work on issues related to clean and renewable energy, indoor environmental quality, and water resources.

The innovation cluster could establish New York as a national and international hotbed for energy-efficiency research and commercialization, Bogucz says. The full project would cost $225 million and involve programs aimed at all stages of product development from basic research to manufacturing, he adds.

Partners haven’t nailed down where that funding would come from, but the idea is for $75 million to come from state sources. Those dollars would in turn attract further investment from private sources such as the universities involved, Bogucz says.

In addition to a focus on research and product development, the cluster will concentrate on connecting upstate companies with the New York City market. The Big Apple has plenty of buildings that could benefit from efficiency upgrades, according to Bogucz.

In fact, New York City policies mandate that some building owners undertake improvements aimed at reducing energy use, he adds.

“They’re driving the market for buildings to become more energy efficiency,” Bogucz says.

The city is also an international hub.

“It essentially becomes a global showcase for products from upstate New York companies,” Bogucz says.

Some of the first companies to work in the new Center of Excellence labs will be DeWitt–based NuClimate Air Quality Systems, Inc., Pulaski–based Fulton Cos., and Syracuse–based Ephesus Technologies, LLC.      

ITHACA — The CBORD Group and GetWellNetwork announced a new partnership May 16 that will allow hospital patients to order personalized meals using in-room televisions and iPads.

CBORD, based in Ithaca, provides colleges, health-care organizations, corporations, and others with hardware and software in areas such as security, access control, identification-card control, food service, and online ordering. GetWellNetwork, based in Bethesda, Md., provides interactive software for patients.

The businesses say integrating meal orders with in-room televisions is an easy option at a time when hospitals are trying to improve patient-satisfaction scores.

“We are very excited about this new partnership and believe that it will improve the patient experience within hospitals across the country,” Cindy McCall, CBORD’s vice president of marketing, said in a news release. “By connecting the GetWellNetwork system with CBORD’s popular room service solution, patients won’t have to wait for overloaded hospital call center operators during high traffic times.”

GetWellNetwork says its software helps patients learn about their medical condition, fill prescriptions, check emails, access the Internet, and watch entertainment programs.

“With CBORD, patients using the GetWellNetwork will now enjoy another benefit that adds to the comfort and convenience of their stay,” Cheryl Gnehem, vice president of professional services for GetWellNetwork, said in the release.

Founded in 1975, CBORD serves more than 6,000 clients in the U.S., Canada, Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, New Zealand, and Australia. CBORD employs more than 400 people.

The firm recently named a new president. Max Steinhardt assumed the post May 1.

He succeeded Tim Tighe, who had been a CBORD executive for more than 25 years. Since joining CBORD in 2006, Steinhardt served as senior vice president of operations and chief operating officer before becoming president.

CBORD is a unit of Roper Industries, Inc. (NYSE: ROP), which acquired the firm in 2008 in a deal worth $367 million. Roper provides products, software, and services to sectors including water, energy, transportation, education, and health care.

Net sales for the first quarter totaled more than $711 million at Roper, up from $645.3 million a year earlier. Net earnings totaled $108 million, up 22 percent from the first quarter of 2011.

The company earned $1.09 per share in the period, up from 91 cents a share a year earlier.

For the full year in 2011, Roper earned $427 million, up 32 percent from 2010. The company earned $4.34 per share for the year, up from $3.34.

Net sales for the year totaled nearly $2.8 billion, up from about $2.4 billion in 2010.    

CORTLAND — A coalition of companies and universities is aiming to make New York a hub for testing equipment for solar and wind-power generation.

The group will use a $4.2 million grant from the New York Energy Research and Development Authority to establish labs for testing of wind and solar equipment at Clarkson University and a site in Cortland. The group is led by London–based Intertek (LSE: ITRK), which provides testing, inspection, and certification services.

The accredited solar-testing site will be at Intertek’s Cortland location. The wind-testing lab, which will focus on blades for small and mid-size wind turbines, will be located at Clarkson University in Potsdam.

Other partners in the initiative, known as the Center for Evaluation of Clean Energy Technology (CeCeT), include AWS TruePower of Albany, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Alfred State College, and Binghamton University.

While the new labs will be key components of the effort, CeCeT is also meant to help new companies and inventors with more than just testing. Organizers say they want to help connect entrepreneurs and startups with universities’ resources that can help them move their ideas forward.

“That’s the bridge that CeCeT creates,” says Sunny Rai, regional vice president for renewable energy at Intertek. “It’s not just the two facilities. It’s access to all those other universities’ expertise and equipment.”

Rai says Intertek’s customers were asking for that kind of help and it’s something the company wouldn’t be able to provide without its partners.

A facility for testing blades on larger turbines exists in Boston, but there isn’t a comparable lab in existence for smaller blades, says Brian Kramak, senior project manager at AWS TruePower, which provides consulting services for the renewable-energy industry. Having the small-blade lab located in New York will be a draw for companies working in the space, which Kramak says is growing.

The equipment needed to test the blades for durability and other qualities is expensive, Kramak adds, and not something most manufacturers would invest in on their own. The presence of the lab at Clarkson could help bring companies to New York, he says.

Testing isn’t yet required for smaller blades, but manufacturers are interested because it helps set them apart from the field, says David Gower, CeCeT executive director. In addition, the solar lab in Cortland will be the only site on the East Coast that can provide certifications for the equipment it tests.

“That is a great advantage for New York state,” Gower says.

The group has plans for other testing facilities as well.

Originally included in the proposal to NYSERDA and still tentatively planned for CeCeT is a “tall tower” facility, Kramak says. The tower would help manufacturers verify that remote-sensing equipment used in measuring wind speeds is working as expected.

There’s interest in remote-sensing technology from offshore wind projects in particular, Kramak says. The equipment uses lasers or sound waves to measure winds without erecting a large, sensor-laden tower.

The tall tower testing site would allow developers to compare the remote sensors with their more traditional counterparts.

Gower says CeCeT is looking to bring in other university partners. Organizers want to add as much experience and as many capabilities to the center as possible, he says

An annual Bloomberg BNA survey of state tax departments released recently asked senior state-tax officials in all 50 states how their jurisdictions are taxing the new technologies and types of transactions that continue to emerge as the U.S. economy shifts to the web-based world, which operates mostly independent of state or local borders. 

The recent survey findings were presented in a new Bloomberg BNA webinar, “Cloudy with a Chance of Nexus: Analyzing Bloomberg BNA’s 2012 Survey of State Tax Departments” on May 17.

States once believed that a corporation needed a physical presence within its borders before it could be subject to an income-based tax, Bloomberg BNA said in a news release. But new technologies, such as cloud computing, and new transaction hubs such as Groupon and LivingSocial, are challenging the parameters of most states’ tax codes, which either have not addressed how these technologies and transactions will be taxed, or do so under outdated provisions.

What constitutes a taxable “economic presence”?

The Bloomberg BNA 2012 State Tax Department Survey identified a number of different scenarios that can trigger income-tax nexus in different states. (Nexus is generally defined as a business having a presence in a state and being subject to state income taxes and sales taxes for sales within that state.). The survey findings are as follows:

– Sixteen states said having a website on a server physically located within their jurisdiction will trigger income-tax nexus

– Fourteen states said that a firm having a substantial number of customers with billing addresses in the state would trigger nexus for the business.

– Thirteen states would apply sales and use tax to fees paid by in-state customers to remotely access canned or prewritten software that is hosted on a web server.

– Nearly every state agreed that social-media coupon companies, such as Groupon or LivingSocial, are not liable for taxes when their coupons are redeemed at in-state retailers or restaurants, the survey found. But the states were divided on the question of whether sales taxes, paid by the end user, should be assessed on the full or the discounted price of the product or service.

– All but six jurisdictions tax an out-of-state employer that permits an employee to telecommute from a home within their borders.

– Twenty-three states said nexus would arise for reimbursing sales staff for the costs of maintaining an in-home office.

– Job fairs or other recruitment activities would trigger income-tax nexus in 21 states.

– Thirty-six states said tax nexus would arise from having employees hire, supervise, or train other employees within their borders.

Bloomberg BNA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomberg, a source of legal, regulatory, and business information for professionals. It has a network of more than 2,500 reporters, correspondents, and leading practitioners.

More than 30 businesses from around the state participated in the recent 2012 Venture Forum in Buffalo.

The event, held May 16 and 17, was a partnership between two long-running venture forums — Buffalo Niagara’s Bright Forum and the Albany–based Center for Economic Growth SmartStart UNYTECH Forum, an upstate New York event that travels to different locations.

Three companies from Central New York — iMuzik, Georeader, and Full Circle Feed — were among the 33 that pitched to angel investors and venture capitalists during the event. The forum drew an audience of more than 300 people, including nearly 60 investors from New York and elsewhere.

“The high quality of the presenters we attract each year is a testament to the wealth of innovation we have in upstate New York,” Jeff Lawrence, Center for Economic Growth executive vice president for technology, said in a news release.

The 2012 Venture Forum’s featured keynote speaker was Victor Thorne, director of Ohio TechAngel Funds, the largest angel group in the United States. The forum was held at the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts and Statler City and at the Albright Knox Art Gallery.

“These forums give us the opportunity to showcase our very best early-stage companies,” Marnie LaVigne, University at Buffalo associate vice president for economic development, said in the release. “Investors travel from all over upstate New York, the eastern United States and Ontario, Canada to attend because they see the value and promise in the technologies emerging from our region.”