A few things that I think are important to acknowledge, listed in no particular order:

1. The Internet/ websites have become the most effective marketing tool for most companies and their effectiveness is growing with the emergence of new management and analytical tools.

2. On a global basis, while growth of Internet use is slowing, the amount of traffic per user is increasing and this creates a greater need for bandwidth capacity, optimization, cloud computing, social networking, systems management, Internet security, processing power and storage.3. The appetite for information, on a global basis, will grow as more content becomes available, opening up opportunities for those that seek them.

4. These trends create more complexity that will be solved with more available technologies that have secular growth stories.

5. This global credit crunch has created some pause in buying IT purchases, but this is temporary.

6. The need for regulation, transparency, collaboration and communication will grow. The need for increased productivity will grow.

7. Most technology companies are debt free and cash flow and earnings positive. The concerns about their customers buying habits are overblown, as the technology stocks have in large part, led the decline in the indices.

8. Our channel checks suggest that sales cycles have gotten longer, purchases are getting delayed, and the environment has been very hard, but not impossible. Further, it seems that most of the resellers we are talking to are feeling reasonably good about the fourth quarter. While they have, by and large expressed concern about 2009, it is notable that the lack of visibility is largely priced into many multinational technology companies without any direct debt exposure.

9. The rich get richer in technology, and customers will likely want to interface with fewer vendors.

Now, with this brief framework in mind, I am looking at companies that are trading with enterprise value to free cash flow or EV/EBITDA multiples that are sub 8x, will have at least nominal growth next year, and can benefit from secular trends once the market decides where to price credit, and equities bottom. Names at the top of my list are EMC (EMC), Cicso (CSCO), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), IBM (IBM), and Symantec (SYMC).

I also believe that as larger IT vendors seek to gain share in a weak environment, they will need to acquire new technologies to out-stack the competition. This is primarily where my firm plays.

Due to the volatile nature of this environment, I am hesitant to make small and mid-cap stock recommendations in this forum, but I believe that buying well capitalized stocks that are leaders in their spaces, benefit from global secular growth trends and are trading at paltry multiples of cash flow and EBITDA, is an activity that will be well rewarded. Pointedly, I do not think there has been a ‘safer’ time to invest in technology with any kind of time horizon.