Sager Electronics celebrated its move to new corporate headquarters by hosting its suppliers and manufacturers representatives at a two-day event.

Sager Electronics celebrated its move to new corporate headquarters by hosting its suppliers and manufacturers representatives at a two-day event. On Wednesday 27th September 2006 Sager held an open house to preview its newly expanded Middleborough, Massachusetts offices and main distribution centre. The following day guests played golf at the award-winning Poquoy Brook Golf Club in Lakeville, or cruised aboard the Pilgrim Belle on Plymouth Harbour.

At Sager's open house, CEO Ray Norton addressed the company's 200 invited guests: 'I am excited to know we are bringing our corporate functions back together with our distribution centre operations'.

'This union will make our company stronger and more nimble as we work to execute our growth plan'.

'Sager's two-day celebration marks another exciting milestone in the company's lengthy history', stated Frank Flynn, Sager's President.

'We were pleased to share this exciting time with those that have supported us and our customer strategy throughout the years'.

'We are excited to begin the next era of our business on such a successful note'.

Sager officially moved into its new corporate headquarters, located at 19 Leona Drive, in Middleborough, Massachusetts, on 21st October 2006.

The expansion will house the company's corporate offices, conference and meeting space, a state-of-the-art data centre and its southern New England sales service centre.

Business Availability Center products are an extensive package of advanced, state-of-the-art tools for measuring and managing critical business processes to ensure business efficiency, stability and longevity in the market. Designed by Mercury Interactive, Business Availability Center products offer users an innovative approach to integrating business, end-user and system perspectives, while also providing a detailed analysis of the infrastructure that incorporates critical applications.

With the help of Mercury Interactive Business Availability Center products, organizations can: manage IT from a business perspective to improve service levels; translate business objectives into IT operational level agreements; ensure alignment between LOBs and IT by measuring and reporting on service levels from an end-user perspective; obtain a detailed map applications and infrastructure environments; rapidly identify, classify and diagnose problems to prevent application downtime; assess impact before deployment in order to minimize business risk.

Mercury Interactive Business Availability Center products encompass a wide variety of innovative tools, including End User Management, Diagnostics, System Availability Management, Service Level Management, Universal CMDB, Application Mapping and SiteScope.

End User Management is used for monitoring website and application availability in real time, from the end-user perspective, allowing organizations to timely identify and fix issues. This very popular Mercury Interactive solution proactively emulates end-user business processes against applications on a 24x7 time basis for over 60 protocols, including web and non-web environments, as well as packaged applications such as Oracle, Siebel, SAP, Citrix and many more. With the help of End User Management, organizations can optimize business outcomes by improving end-users’ quality of experience; lower costs by reducing the number of help desk calls from end users due to application performance degradation; minimize revenue risk associated with customer abandonment as a consequence of unacceptable reliability or performance problems; mitigate business risks and costs by reducing the number and duration of application outages.

Mercury Diagnostics is a very popular solution that helps users to ensure availability and performance in order to provide better quality of service to the business. Mercury Diagnostics can be used to efficiently resolve a series of problems that can deteriorate business availability: end users experiencing slow performance when submitting orders; business-critical applications run out of memory; online portal for order status fails intermittently; frequent failure of cluster nodes. By using Diagnostics, organizations can substantially reduce the frequency and duration of incidences, thus lowering the costs associated with problem identification and resolution; lower costs by reducing fault management efforts, as well as hardware and software expenses; collaborate across team boundaries and streamline the learning curve of those people responsible for maintaining J2EE, NET and ERP/CRM applications.

System Availability Management, corroborated with Mercury SiteScope, enables users to efficiently deploy and maintain an enterprise infrastructure monitoring solution. System Availability Management connects to existing Enterprise Management System products or uses Mercury SiteScope to collect and monitor system availability and performance data from across the entire enterprise. With System Availability Management, organizations can maximize ROI and improve scalability by eliminating excess infrastructure capacity from the system; reduce hardware, software and support overhead associated with managing business-critical applications and infrastructure; reduce costs from topology based correlation by measuring and managing only the important aspects; increase administrator productivity via prioritized alerts based on service level or operational level breaches, instead of flood of alerts.

Mercury SiteScope is today’s most efficient agentless system monitoring solution designed to ensure the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures, such as servers, operating systems, network devices, network services, applications and application components. With the help of Mercury SiteScope, organizations can lower total cost of ownership by consolidating support and maintenance tasks to a central agentless server; reduce the need to track and remotely administer thousands of agents including their overhead on production systems; save time and money by deploying Solution Templates – best practice-based groups of monitors for key applications; eliminate the need for multiple solutions via SiteScope’s industry leading breadth of more than 65 supported monitoring targets.

Mercury Service Level Management enables users to proactively manage service levels from the business perspective and provide service level agreement-compliance reporting for complex business applications in distributed environments. With Mercury Service Level Management, organizations can reduce costs by eliminating the need for manual, ongoing report generation; maximize the availability of revenue producing applications; reduce the level of effort required to produce and distribute service level documentation.

Mercury Universal CMDB provides the background required to succeed in service management initiatives. The solution comprises a complete business-service-oriented data model with built-in auto-discovery of configurations and configuration item dependencies, visualization and mapping of business services, as well as tracking of configuration changes. With the help of Mercury Universal CMDB, organizations can federate and reconcile data from existing repositories and other CMDBs; visualize and map the used infrastructure in a multitude of ways; track changes using a continuous CI (configuration item) change history; perform sophisticated analyses based on complex relationships; rapidly perform tasks such as report creation, database administration, or event simulation.

Application Mapping provides visibility into the dynamic relationships between used applications and the underlying infrastructure. The solution continuously updates and maintains this topology map within a common relationship model, enabling users to quickly assess business impact of IT issues. It also substantially simplifies the complexity of understanding and controlling IT elements like networks, systems, and application interdependencies. With Mercury Application Mapping, organizations can lower deployment and maintenance costs while accelerating time-to-market; mitigate the business risk and cost of downtime; reduce data collection and assessment costs for data center consolidation initiatives; optimize Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts; build topology maps, evaluate business impacts, track and verify changes and prepare reports; reduce downtime and improve productivity with application diagnostics and root cause analysis for permanent resolution of issues.

These remarkable Mercury Interactive solutions are nowadays extensively used by organizations of many different types and sizes. Along with Mercury QuickTest Pro and Mercury LoadRunner (which provides high-quality load and stress testing services), Business Availability Center products can substantially increase business efficiency and performance.

The increasing amount of workload on businesses has established a special place for outsourcing in the business market. Be it accounting or bookkeeping or any other work, outsourcing is becoming successful in solving thousands of problems. The matter of outsourcing is concerned with giving your work and responsibilities to the other company. Finance accounting outsourcing is meant to shed off the excess workload regarding the maintenance of accounts. Maintaining the accounts is a very difficult task that has to be accomplished with proper attention. And if you have to handle the other work also, then the accounting work will suffer.

Finance accounting outsourcing will save a lot of your precious time. The time thus saved can be used for concentrating on other matters of your business that need more attention. When the accounting work is outsourced, then you are left with enough time to take care of your marketing division, production division or any other division that reaps more and more rewards. After all, we all do business for earning profits and not suffering losses. Moreover, accounting outsourcing will give you higher quality of efficient work. It is because the professionals at other companies are only concentrating on your work. They don’t undertake any other department.

Usually, the accounting firms give the excess of work to specialized companies that can handle them easily. Finance accounting outsourcing has been considered cost effective also. The expenses of keeping an entire specialized staff for managing accounting work can be more expensive than outsourcing it. You and your accounting firm will have to manage the salary and various allowances of the employee. On the other hand, you don’t have to give any allowance or higher salaries to the outsourcing companies. You just have to pay them a fixed amount for carrying out your task that can be less than your other expenses.

Finance accounting outsourcing is the best way to improve your efficiency. The excess workload can hamper your progress. It is because you will not be able to give enough time to other areas that call for appropriate attention. The main disadvantage of working under pressure or with excess of workload is that you tend to suffer losses. You may gain control and hold over the problems and their timely solution. Accounting outsourcing or any other type of outsourcing will enable you to save a lot of time that can be spent in solving the matters of other aspects of your business.

The process of finance accounting outsourcing involves giving your work to the third party, with the help of an accounting outsourcing firm. The main aim of adopting such method is to free you from the burden of overload of work. An important aspect of accounting outsourcing is that your work can be done in the half the time as compared to the work done in house. The reason behind this is that the outsourcing firm specializes only in such type of work and there is other workload on your employees also. Even the quality of work will be much better than the in-house employees.

Make sure the condition of the property you want to buy will survive market conditions before seeking a commercial real estate mortgage. When you go to purchase a new residence, a good lender does a thorough financial background check on the individual seeking to borrow money. On the other hand, when you go to apply for a commercial real estate mortgage, the lender’s greatest concern is the property. Some of the most important issues include your credit score. But that’s not enough. The lender wants to make sure the property is in pristine condition and will survive tumultuous market conditions.

Research the commercial market

Before deciding to seek a commercial real estate mortgage, scout the city or town and get a sense of the market conditions. Are there many “for rent” or “for sale” signs for multi-family units such as offices or apartments? Is the commercial property in a part of town that receives enough traffic flow or is it difficult to locate? Talk to professionals in the area to find out where you can find the best deals before obtaining a commercial real estate mortgage.

Prepare to put money down

Just as you would put money down on the purchase your dream house, you will need to come up with money for a commercial mortgage. Most lenders want between 15 and 20 percent down. Next, you are ready to see if you can pre-qualify for a property. A loan officer will put together a loan package before giving you a letter of interest. Then, the lender will review the file and create a loan document.

Gathering documents for mortgage

You can begin getting together the documents you need in order to move along the commercial mortgage process. Put together your employment history for the past two years as well as with salary, employment dates, pay stubs and the contact information of your employers. You should also figure out your net worth and list all other assets. Make sure you have all of your tax records organized. Bring along your social security card, the last three statements from savings and checking accounts, stocks and certificate of deposits. You should make a copy of your 401K or IRA plans, the title of your automobiles or loan information. Finally, write down the names, addresses and account numbers for all credit cards, loans and mortgages so those facts and figures will be handy for your loan officer.

We are a society in the fast lane, and as a population, we have been desensitized by hype in advertising. Our televisions, radios and newspapers are rampant with product advertising having deadlines. We have annual linen sales, home remodeling sales, jewelry sales, and even car sales. I cannot believe that I am the only person that is fed up with all the impersonal marketing crap that is out there. People are suckered into buying something they do not need, did not want, and were not even looking for every day just because they fell for advertising that made them feel like they must act now or forever regret not buying. The sad part of it is that most of what is advertised and sold like this is nothing but junk.

In recent years, this type of advertising has spilled over into business opportunities as well. Every day I get email telling me I should sign up to sell some healthcare product and participate in someone's teleseminar to learn how I can make tons of money, BUT in order to take advantage of the "opportunity" I need to act quickly because the successful entrepreneur running the show is only accepting the first 100 serious applicants. I read this as, "Hurry up and send me your money sucker, don't waste any more of my time trying to convince you because there are plenty of others out there that will jump at the chance to give me their money."

The first problem I see with advertising with an urgency to sign up for a business "opportunity" is that if there truly were an urgency, then by the time you read the advertisement, it is already too late. Part of this I attribute to the fact that if the opportunity was really that great and the person promoting it really made the millions they claimed to make, they would not sell you their system for $39.99 when they could just as easily employ a few people at nominal salaries and make even more for themselves. I can't believe people fall for the con man that says he is only going accept the first 100 applicants because he wants to train them himself one-on-one before accepting any new applicants. Are we really supposed to believe that someone making millions of dollars a year ($20,000+ per week) is going to coach us one-on-one for $39.99? Based on an eight-hour day this person would be earning $480.00+ per hour if he were making $1,000,000.00 per year. That means that a $39.99 one-on-one session with him would be worth only five minutes of his time. Do you think he is going to tell you anything in five minutes that is going to make you a millionaire too?

The next time you see a business "opportunity" advertised and you find the concept interesting, ask yourself why is it being advertised at all. If you are looking to make a steady income by using the Internet, find a product or service to sell that has a good reputation and does not rely on hype to instill a sense of urgency in order to get customers to buy it.

Personally, after a couple years of looking and trying some of the other "opportunities," I opted to sell books online. I have sold books through Amazon.com, Alibris.com, Abebooks.com, ebay.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Half.com, Biblio.com, and a few other marketplaces that are not as well known. I'll bet you have even heard of a few of these marketplaces too, haven't you? That is precisely why I chose to sell used books online. People know the products, they trust the marketplaces, and they know it isn't a con.

It doesn't take anything special to become an online bookseller, I get most of my books to sell from local thrift stores, Friends of the Library sales shelves, library book sales, and the clearance shelves of a local used book store. I am averaging over $11.00 profit per book, I know which ones to buy before I pay for them, and people actually appreciate being able to buy books through my third-party store in these well known marketplaces.

If you enjoy reading, spending time in places with books, and being around others that enjoy books, online bookselling just might be the home-based business opportunity you are looking for.

The number of women owned businesses in the US increased by 43 per cent between 1997 and 2006, almost double that of all businesses. In the UK, about 20,500 new businesses were started by women in the first quarter of 2006, an increase of more than 30 per cent from the same quarter last year. The rising trend in women starting their businesses is a worldwide phenomenon.

According to a study by three prominent women's business organizations the National Foundation for Women Business Owners (NFWBO), Catalyst, and The Committee of 200, women who launch their businesses are primarily inspired by an entrepreneurial idea. Entrepreneurship offers the opportunities to implement entrepreneurial ideas and gives women a sense of recognition since they work for themselves.

Other reasons for women starting their own business are the flexibility to dictate their own working hours, spend more time with the family and to escape the corporate glass ceiling.

How do you come up with an idea that can be transformed into a business? Here are four tips on brainstorming for business ideas.

Your passion and interests

What are you interested in? What do you do best? If you like to bake, then you may want to start a business in baking. If you are passionate about cooking, how about starting a catering business? When you build your business around your interests or passion, you are more likely to focus and persist when faced with challenges and obstacles.

Therefore, think about the things you like to do, or even if it is something new, what you want to learn about. Make a list of all these things and then go through the list to determine which ones are realistic and feasible.

Will you sell a product or service?

When deciding whether to sell a service or product you need to consider some of several factors. What is your business about? Do you have the ability to offer that product or service? Are you crafty? Can you make your own product? Do you want to sell someone else's product by becoming an independent distributor? What is your budget?

Problems and solutions

People are always searching for solutions to problems. Look around you. Ask your friends, family and neighbors. There may already be existing products or services to solve a particular problem. Can you improve on these products or services? In the case where there is no solution, can you come up with one? Generally, a solution helps to save time, money or stress.

Hobbies

Consider what you like to do in your spare time, and see if it could be turned into a business venture. If your hobby is painting, you could sell paintings or create custom paintings. Crafts and collectibles are some of the most sought after items in the consumer world.

It is often said that "two heads are better than one". To spawn more creativity, brainstorm with friends, family, co-workers and neighbors. You will be amazed at the various ideas that you'd never have thought of on your own, one of which could be translated into a viable business.