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A new survey of technology execs in “New England’s Silicon Valley” shows unexpected optimism. Almost 70 percent expected first-quarter revenue to remain steady or grow, and more than 80 percent expected sales to stay flat or grow for the year. Almost 30 percent said they plan to hire between one and 50 employees this year.

More than 170 technology companies, concentrated in the Boston, Massachusetts region, participated in the survey, mainly representing software, Internet, bio med-tech, and telecom tech companies. Most are smaller, privately held companies, so this kind of information and 2009 projections are not readily available.

The survey sought to gauge the sales expectations of CEOs and VPs of Sales for first quarter and the rest of 2009. It was conducted by OPEXEngine on behalf of NETSEA (New England Technology Sales, Marketing and Business Development Association and Mass High Tech (The Journal of New England Technology).

While all news was not positive, and many companies expect decreases in sales, almost 11 percent of the executives surveyed expect 20 to 50 percent growth, and six percent expect more than 50 percent growth. “Most of the younger companies – those founded since 2000 – are the one expecting the greatest growth,” says OPEXEngine’s CEO Lauren Kelley, “although contracts signed last year, before the current slowdown, were cited by some of the companies reporting growth in the first quarter that just ended on March 30.” Kelley plans to make a comparative study of similar companies on the West coast to compare the regions’ technology sectors.

Here are the basic findings. Complete survey results are posted on the NETSEA site.

Positive Revenue Forecasts
Almost 40% expect revenue growth in Q1 over 2008, about 30% expect Q1 to be essentially flat, and about 30% expect a decrease in revenues in Q1 compared to 2008. The outlook for full year revenues is even more optimistic, with almost 55% of responding companies expecting sales growth in 2009 over 2008, including about 18% expecting more than 20% growth, despite the difficult economy.

Sales Hiring
Also good news for New England sales executives is that only about 5% of companies expect to layoff sales headcount in the first half of 2009, and about 30% expect to hire new sales headcount. The rest expect sales headcount to remain essentially flat throughout the year.

OPEXEngine has done extensive benchmarking of technology companies, and has complied a library of operational metrics for over 50 public and privately held software firms. In an announcement co-released last week by EDGAR Online and OPEXEngine, the company launched it’s On-Demand Dashboards which enable users to create comparative financial analysis reports that can be downloaded into a pre-loaded Excel spreadsheet. (The online tool is populated by XBRL-tagged data from EDGAR Online.)