Phoenix IT makes much of its money from disaster recovery – providing emergency back-up services to companies to ensure that they can keep trading despite disruptions to their business.

But when that disruption is as severe as insolvency, there is a danger that Phoenix suffers, too.

So it was that the small-cap technology company was forced to rush out a statement to the Stock Exchange after this week’s collapse of Lehman Brothers. Although Phoenix did not name the customer, it said that it had a £4 million-a-year contract with a “large investment bank”, the next payment for which is due in November. Its shares fell 17 per cent over the next few days to close last night at a record low.

Other constituents of the technology sector are also feeling the fallout from an extraordinary week on Wall Street. Shares in Fidessa, a world leader in developing equity trading systems for stockbrokers, came under pressure as analysts cut next year’s profit forecasts: between them, Lehman and Merrill Lynch, its biggest customer, account for about 8 per cent of sales.

Misys, the FTSE 250 banking software specialist, felt a double blow. Not only is Lehman one of the biggest customers of its treasury and capital markets division but the US investment bank was also due to provide $305 million of debt finance to fund Misys’s proposed merger with Allscripts, the American healthcare provider.

But as the chart below shows, it is likely to take more than such setbacks to unsettle the course of the FTSE software and computer services index, which, over the past five months, has comfortably outperformed the wider all-share index. That resilience is explained in part by the fact that the four stocks that account for about a half of the sector index – Autonomy, Aveva, Logica and Sage Group – are less directly exposed to a financial services slowdown.

The other is that, with the exception of Dell, the world’s second-biggest computer maker – which this week issued its second profit warning in the space of a fortnight – most of the trading updates from the sector have been broadly positive. That trend was extended yesterday by Oracle, the American software giant, which reported first-quarter profit growth that was stronger than expected.

Indeed, the IT sector has many characteristics that might be considered defensive. Most of its constituents have solid balance sheets and are highly cash-generative: over the past four years, for example, Sage’s cashflow has consistently exceeded its operating profits. Further, most companies have a significant proportion of recurring revenues.

After the boom and bust of the dot-com era, there has been a shift to pursuing business models that build a broad base of long-term contracted sales – mostly maintenance and support fees, which for software developers are between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of initial licence fees and are billed on an annual basis.

However, although nobody is predicting the sort of retrenchment that followed the bursting of the tech bubble at the turn of the decade, some sort of slowdown is seen as inevitable after a five-year run in which global technology spending has risen by between 5 per cent and 6 per cent a year.

Roger Phillips, technology analyst at Evolution Securities, suggests that, with the exception of the financial services industry, what slackening there has been so far is less a case of an immediate spending moratorium, than a steady reduction.

Even so, he notes that economic data over the past 40 years shows that business investment tends to follow household spending, suggesting that the present consumer-led slowdown ultimately will feed through into corporate IT spending. Figures from Changewave, the US research house, already show a gradual reduction in IT spending, while other independent analysis indicates that in real terms – that is, adjusted for GDP – IT spending is likely to be flat this year and negative in 2009.

However, Evolution believes that the fourth quarter of this year is likely to prove the sector’s key test – partly because of the longstanding tradition for software licence sales, which typically represent pure profits, to be signed in the last two weeks of the quarter.

Mr Phillips also contends that operational gearing – the extent to which profits are hit by a fall in sales – in the sector can be deceptive, citing Misys and Dimension Data, the IT reseller, as vulnerable to falling revenues.

If there is a ground for optimism, it is that, at 13 times current-year earnings – against a long-run average of between 15 and 21 times – the IT sector does not appear especially dear. The recent appreciation of the dollar against sterling should also boost reported earnings, with the likes of Sage being among the beneficiaries.

Further, the recent wave of consolidation in the sector – seen this summer in the takeover of Detica by BAE Systems and the purchase of Axon by Infosys – might be expected to continue. One sixth of the sector has disappeared through bid activity in the past year alone.

The key to sentiment in the short term is likely to come from forthcoming trading updates from the likes of Cisco Systems, IBM and SAP. In the meantime, the sector’s recent outperformance suggests that prospective bargain-hunters should sit on the sidelines for now.

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