There has been a considerable amount of noise created on the start-up front, especially in the Indian IT sector. But the question arises here is what lies in start-up companies’ fate taking slowdown into consideration? Are the big corporates still being aggressive with huge investments in the Venture Capital (VC) front or are they taking up more calculated and defensive investment strategies?

The economic slowdown over the past few months has caused a slump in the investments into IT start-ups. When the Indian IT sector boasts about revolution it brought in the Indian economy over the past couple of decades, it primarily speaks about IT services. The technology products, except few, have not done much to contribute to India’s “booming IT industry” though it’s not booming anymore.

At a two-day annual conference organized by Headstart Foundation and Compute 2009 in Bangalore today, a panel spoke on entrepreneurship, start-ups and VCs. The Foundation also selected ten start-up companies as the best technology product start-ups -CashNxt, Entrip, SnappyFingers, Alertpedia, Verismo, IndusGeeks, WisdomTap, TringMe, Artin Dynamics and Mesh Labs.

Throwing light on the impact of slowdown on investments in start-ups, Cannan Partners Executive director, Harish Gandhi said “There has been a slowdown in terms of venture and private equity investments but no slowdown in their interests and entrepreneurship”.

He further added, “For start-ups, its right time to hire as expectations of 30% salary rise won’t be there”.

Speaking on the occasion, Honeywell director (strategies and initiatives), Harsha Angeri said, “A structured platform for start-ups to showcase innovations and work with Honeywell on its customer’s pain points will create a new value stream or both”.

Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs India head, Vishy Poosala adding on the entrepreneurship within corporates, said “Companies, big or small, have to innovate year-after-year or they will fall prey to others.”

The product start-ups selected as the top 10 are mostly in enterprise and mobile domains. Not many product start-ups are faring well in the financial services or telecom domain.

Kallol Borah, HeadStart Foundation founder told IT Examiner, “There are start-up companies doing good even in domains like financial services and telecom but domain expertise in these areas is becoming important”.

He added, “There are lots of people coming out with ideas but not necessarily achieving success. They have to clear with their ideas which should be enough to reach out  to people.” X