SYRACUSE — SyracuseFirst and CenterState CEO are launching a new partnership to encourage more support for locally owned businesses.

Members of SyracuseFirst, a nonprofit launched in 2009 to promote buying local, will now have access to a dual membership in both organizations. SyracuseFirst has 220 members, including local companies and nonprofits.

The organization will maintain its own identity and Chris Fowler will continue as executive director.

One of the chief goals of the partnership will be to bring local companies together to do business with each other, says Jane Amico, CenterState CEO vice president of chamber services. The more connections and relationships the groups can foster among Central New York businesses, the better, she says.

Both organizations hold numerous networking events and combining resources makes sense, Fowler adds.

“Here we are, trying to get the same people involved,” he says. “Why not try to get all these people together and coordinate?”

Working with CenterState will allow for more education and promotion in the business community on SyracuseFirst’s events and other initiatives, Amico notes.

“We want to build on the events we’ve had that have been successful in the past,” Fowler says.

The partnership will allow the groups to share resources instead of compete for the attention of the same companies, Amico adds.

“Our missions are very much in alignment,” she says.

In addition to encouraging more business-to-business activity among local companies, SyracuseFirst also performs outreach to consumers and aims to get municipal and government leaders thinking more about using local vendors, Fowler says. The group has run events in the past like a Buy Local Bash that brought together local restaurants, food companies, musicians, and others.

The event drew more than 500 people both times it was held, Fowler says. The group also ran a Shop Syracuse Week during the holiday season for the past two years to encourage consumers to shop at local stores.

The group is launching a series of Cuse Mobs to support local businesses and educate consumers on the benefits of buying local, Fowler says. Known as cash mobs in other cities, the events began popping up last year, according to Syracuse First.

Organizers encouraged participants to ‘mob’ local companies and asked them to spend some cash at a pre-determined location. SyracuseFirst is organizing a Syracuse version of the event through social media and on the group’s website at www.syracusefirst.org.

CenterState CEO, with 2,000 members, is the region’s main business group.     

DeWITT — Anaren, Inc. (NASDAQ: ANEN) has continued cutting jobs in the face of declining profits and sales.

The DeWitt–based company began eliminating jobs last July and has so far reduced its work force of 1,000 employees by 19 percent, CFO George Blanton said during an April 25 conference call to discuss Anaren’s latest quarterly results.

The moves resulted in personnel savings of $6.6 million, Blanton said. The company also took other steps to cut costs during its most recent quarter that will bring total cost savings to $11 million annually.

Total operating expenses for the quarter ending March 31 fell to $9.9 million from $11.8 million in the same period last year. Through the first nine months of Anaren’s fiscal year, ending March 31, operating expenses totaled $30.8 million, down from about $34 million in the year-earlier period.

Anaren, which has locations in the Syracuse area, New Hampshire, Colorado, and China, did not provide further details on the job cuts. The company develops and manufactures components and subsystems for applications in sectors including satellite communications, defense, and wireless communications.

Profit in Anaren’s fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, totaled $2 million, or 14 cents a share, down more than 41 percent from the same period a year earlier. Net sales dropped more than 21 percent to $34.7 million.

A decline in demand for some of the company’s wireless products drove the sales dip, Anaren Chairman, President, and CEO Lawrence Sala said during the conference call. Sales in the firm’s wireless business totaled $10.2 million in the fiscal third quarter, down more than 32 percent from a year earlier.

Company leaders believe the dip in wireless sales is temporary. Customer forecasts are showing strength and wireless sales should increase during Anaren’s fiscal fourth quarter, Sala said.

Sales in the company’s space and defense business totaled $24.5 million for the quarter, down 15.1 percent. The dip resulted mainly from a decline of $2.8 million in sales related to Anaren’s work on a subsystem for a product developed by Cicero–based SRC, Inc. that disables improvised explosive devices (IED).

Some new radar-contracts customers should give Anaren a boost in the coming months, Sala said. The firm expects 

$15 million to $17 million in new radar-related orders as a result, he said.

That should help total space and defense sales should recover in the company’s fourth quarter, he added.

Also, Anaren announced three contracts on April 9 totaling $11.5 million for subsystems used in airborne applications. The orders are part of a long-term supply agreement with a defense contractor for domestic and international applications of Anaren’s proprietary electronic warfare technology.

Deliveries will begin in the fiscal first quarter of 2013 and take place over 26 months, the company said.

For Anaren’s fiscal fourth quarter, ending June 30, net sales should reach $35 million to $40 million with earnings per share of 11 cents to 23 cents, Sala said. 

The U. S. Department of Energy has selected teams from Cornell University Sustainable Design and the university’s Cornell Energy Institute to compete in a geothermal energy contest.

The teams from Cornell are now finalists in the 2012 National Geothermal Student Competition, which will have students analyzing the economic feasibility of developing geothermal energy in the Snake River Plain in Idaho. That region is a potential area for near-term geothermal development in the United States, according to a 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study.

“The National Geothermal Student Competition challenges the country’s best and brightest students to develop innovative approaches to expanding geothermal energy production in the United States, advancing our commitment to an all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a news release.

The Cornell University Sustainable Design team will use geologic remote sensing to profile the Snake River Plain to uncover areas with thermal potential. The Cornell Energy Institute team will collect data in the region and will review geothermal resource studies, maps, and models to try to identify markets for geothermal heat or electricity.

Other finalists taking part in the competition include teams from Boise State University, the Colorado School of Mines, Idaho State University, the Southern Methodist University Geothermal Laboratory, the University of Idaho, and the University of Texas at Austin. The Department of Energy plans to give each team $10,000 in technical assistance.

The competition ends in October, when three teams will present their findings at the annual Geothermal Resources Council meeting in Reno, Nev.

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com

SYRACUSE — The Syracuse University (SU) Kauffman Entrepreneurship Engagement Fellows program has continued growing since its beginning three years ago.

This year’s group totals 16 students, up from 10 a year earlier and just two in the program’s first year in 2009-2010. The students receive one year of tuition at the university and make a commitment to stay in Central New York and start some sort of entrepreneurial venture.

Some end up growing companies here and providing real jobs, says Bruce Kingma, SU associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation. Others use the experience as a springboard to local employment elsewhere.

The overall goal is to help some of SU’s best students grow roots in Central New York, Kingma says.

“This is helping,” he says. “We’re putting people in Syracuse that have offers elsewhere.”

The four fellows from the effort’s first two years all still live in Syracuse. The first group included a co-founder of BrandYourself.com, which recently attracted $1.2 million in investment and won the $200,000 grand prize in the 2011 Creative Core Emerging Business Competition.

The idea that entrepreneurship can be a valid path is catching on among students at SU, Kingma adds. It can provide a route to a living based around a passion or provide unique experience when applying for jobs at other companies.

The lackluster employment market is probably a contributing factor to the trend, but not the sole explanation, Kingma says.

“When you’re really engaged with experiential entrepreneurship, you simply find it more exciting,” he says.

Students often spend their entire college careers working on entrepreneurial projects, Kingma says, thanks to a combination of classes and programs like the Raymond von Dran Innovation and Disruptive Entrepreneurship Accelerator (IDEA), which aims to spark more student ventures. That leaves many of them with a desire to continue that work into a fifth year.

Kingma also notes that being an entrepreneur and working for another company aren’t mutually exclusive. Students often combine both successfully, he says.

This year’s fellows are working on projects including The Palette, an e-commerce site and mobile shop where SU students can promote and sell their art work, and Performance Driving School, which aims to teach proper driving rules, skills, and techniques combined with car-performance basics, according to SU. Other projects include Waterport, which is developing a portable and self-sustained rainwater-harvesting system to turn rain into drinking water in impoverished villages, and SocialU 101, a platform to help older individuals with social media.

The Engagement Fellows program was launched in 2009 by Imagining America, a national consortium of more than 80 colleges, and Enitiative, an SU-led project to spark more entrepreneurship and innovation in Central New York.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation supports the fellows program and funded the launch of Enitiative in 2007 with a 

$3 million grant.      

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield will remain a regional company with work forces in various areas of New York, according to the CEO-elect of the health plan and its parent company.

“We believe the local employment is good for our company,” says Christopher Booth, who is currently the president of Excellus, Central New York’s largest health insurer. “People like to do business with their neighbors. I think it is the right thing to do for communities, and I think it is the right thing to do for our company.”

The Lifetime Healthcare Companies, which is the Rochester–based parent of Excellus, announced at the beginning of April that Booth will be its next CEO and the next CEO of Excellus. Booth will assume the CEO role after the not-for-profit group’s current CEO, David Klein, retires at the end of the year.

Excellus currently employs 950 people in Central New York. It employs 400 people in Utica and 30 in the Southern Tier. The Lifetime Healthcare Companies has more than 6,500 employees.

Booth first joined the Lifetime Healthcare Companies in 2004 as chief administrative officer and general counsel. He has also held the roles of executive vice president for commercial markets and health-care affairs as well as executive vice president and COO.

However, he was familiar with the company before joining it. Booth spent nearly two decades at Hinman Straub P.C., which is the Lifetime Healthcare Companies’ outside legal counsel in Albany. 

Booth worked closely with the health insurer while at Hinman Straub. The chairman of the Lifetime Healthcare Companies board of directors, Randall Clark, called Booth the “architect of our entire corporation” in a statement announcing Booth’s selection as CEO in waiting.

“I was the person that sort of put together the mergers of the Blue plans from Syracuse, Utica, and Rochester, both from a legal structure and a regulatory-approval process,” Booth says. “And then I worked with the company on how it should operate. Both it and its subsidiaries.”

Booth says he will have to refresh his knowledge of some of the Lifetime Healthcare Companies’ subsidiaries as he prepares to take over as CEO, which will make him responsible for those subsidiaries. Currently, he is responsible solely for Excellus.

The Lifetime Healthcare Companies’ other subsidiaries include MedAmerica, which provides long-term care insurance to more than 122,000 national policyholders; Lifetime Health Medical Group, a provider of direct medical care for over 80,000 patients in the Buffalo and Rochester areas; and Lifetime Care Home Care and Hospice, which serves 22,000 people a year. Other subsidiaries include Sibley Nursing Personnel Services, which helps home-care patients and temporary medical-staffing clients in 31 New York counties; EBS-RMSCO, which offers employee-benefits and risk-management services for 4,000 U.S. employers; and Support Services Alliance, which offers employee-benefits services for 6,000 businesses and acts as a general agent for over 300 brokers. 

“Some of those subsidiaries reported to me in the past,” Booth says. “I’m familiar with them, and I’ve had responsibility for them in the past.”

Excellus is reviewing its subsidiaries and their operations, Booth says. He declined to discuss specific plans for the future, however.

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the federal health-reform law, will be the main issue for the Excellus health plan moving forward, Booth says. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on that law’s constitutionality in June.

“We don’t know what the court’s going to do,” Booth says. “Our assumption is that the law is going to be in effect, and we have to be ready.”

Excellus is preparing to engage consumers in the new state health-insurance exchange called for in the federal law, Booth says. It is also trying to work with hospital systems and doctors to keep down health-care costs.

 “People are very dissatisfied with the [price] increases year-to-year,” he says. “That needs to be the priority going forward. Some of that work we need to do as an insurance company. Some of that work providers need to do. Some of it needs to be done between insurance providers and community leaders.”

The Lifetime Healthcare Companies is a $6.2 billion not-for-profit organization that provides health insurance to more than 1.8 million people and sells long-term care coverage in all 50 states.