The roller coaster economy is highlighting the ups and downs of different businesses. So in tech, who’s up?

That would be the Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors and the folks who make netbooks, those scaled back laptops that’ll handle your word processing and net browsing needs.

Tech analyst Ray Wang (who blogs about the industry with uncanny insight) says he thinks SaaS might just be recession-proof, a nice thing in this climate when both recession denial and forecasting seem to be about as accurate as war plans.

While many IT folks are proceeding cautiously with SaaS, the potential savings are helping overcome plenty of phobia about subscribing to these services.

The folks at Forrester have been watching the trend toward SaaS and the vendors they’re tracking have averaged a 40% increase in business. Not bad in an economy where almost everything seems to be tanking.

While netbooks are only 5% of the PC market share, that share’s been steadily rising while revenue from PC and laptop sales has fallen off in the recent months.

These handy little portables have created a new lower-priced market segment for consumers and forced makers of regular notebooks to cut prices on existing laptops or introduce newer, cheaper notebook PCs in response, say analysts.

Just in case you’re not familiar with netbooks, they are light-weight, low-cost, small (mostly 7-12 inch screens), energy-efficient, highly portable laptops that have fewer features and use less processing power. They’re ideal for Web browsing, e-mail and using Web-based apps that operate in “the cloud.”

Which is probably why they’re booming during the bust. As IT pros look for ways to cut costs but continue delivering services their users need, these new technologies are coming to the rescue.

Tags: e-mail, Economy, netbooks, PCs, SaaS, service, Software, Web browsing