(SILICON VALLEY) HOW things have changed in just one year. A year ago today, even though the dotcoms were starting to fizzle out, companies providing technology to large companies were still riding on a frothy wave. Stock prices of such 'serious technology' companies as Cisco and Sun Microsystems were still powering ahead. All this changed in early January, when it became clear that year-end sales had fallen well short of everyone's expectations.

The tech industry's precipitous slide since then has been keenly felt across the Valley, swiftly reaching the shores of tech-dependent Singapore.

Since the slowdown, companies that a year ago were scrambling to get onto the technology bandwagon have responded in a variety of ways. They have frozen their tech acquisition budgets, shut down entire technology groups within their companies, and some are almost bending over backwards to disassociate themselves from the bubble that is now a dirty word.

This phenomenon was front and centre in our minds as my fellow technology journalists and I sat through four days of company presentations last week. We were taking part in an international press tour of several Silicon Valley software startups.

Almost all of the companies were seeing a frustrating slowdown in their sales or marketing cycle. Closing a sale with corporate clients has become that much harder since the slowdown began earlier this year. In the case of one company, the sales cycle was now three times longer than it was a just a year ago.

The unspoken hope of all of them was that they would be able to get enough business so that they could plough cash back into developing a better product in order to meet ever-increasing technical requirements.

This reluctance to invest by companies, which have to watch their budgets of late, is understandable. The question is: will company chiefs have the vision and the understanding to know a good piece of technology when they see it, or will it be a 'once bitten, twice shy' reaction to technology, shying away from investments that may only generate value over time?

The companies we met all offered products which were developed as a result of projects the founders were working on, or developed to solve specific problems. In this way, these startups differed from many dotcoms whose genesis lay in a 'great idea' alone.

Among the startups were Jareva, which offers a network infrastructure management software that performs tasks that are usually labour-intensive. For example, IT managers can control all the functions, including the power supply, of a company's Internet servers from their desktop. The software even allows an IT manager to check whether the company has a valid software licence to copy, say, Windows 2000 onto a brand-new machine, and then automatically copy the software onto the machine. It can cut down the number of network administrators as much as 10 times, and reduce the time needed to get a new server online from 10 days to as little as 10 minutes.

Another company, Quova, offers a controversial product that identifies the exact geographical location (right down to postal code) of website visitors in real time. It even identifies the user's connection speed and type of connection (DSL or dial-up?) he is using. The software naturally raises a host of privacy issues, but is finding strong interest in, surprisingly, the gambling industry, which is eager to show regulators that its Web sites are used only by customers in states where gambling is legal.

Other applications include software licensing compliance and fraud detection. On the security side, DigitalPersona offers fingerprint recognition software and sensors at the consumer, corporate and online level, while Sanctum features a unique virus and worm protection software that can prevent unauthorised changes of a Web application even by users within a corporate firewall.

To smoothen out the bottlenecks in Internet access and generally speed everything up, Redline Networks offers a dedicated box which offloads some of the work involved in transferring Internet data, thus expanding server capacity some 20 times, and increasing available bandwidth by some 60 per cent.

With compelling technologies of offer, savvy CEOs with an eye to future cost savings, increased efficiency and added value can ill-afford to throw the technology baby out with the bathwater. A continued commitment to investing in real, problem-solving technology can have tremendous payoffs for a company, boosting productivity, creating a competitive edge, cutting costs and fattening the ultimate bottom line.