Professional tech investor on the shares he's buying

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Last year was challenging for high-growth technology and internet companies, which led to a broader market sell-off following concerns over high valuations. With the market refocused on value over growth, younger innovators lost out. But growth always wins against value in the long term.

This year should bring a revival in cutting-edge technology companies with strong growth potential. Leading the list are Facebook and Google - the world has hardly started to scratch the surface in terms of the "always on" connected world.

The other social networking name with strong potential is LinkedIn. The company is the number one player in the global recruitment market and has three main areas of focus: recruitment, sales solutions and marketing solutions.

With 332 million registered members and 30,000 corporate customers, LinkedIn has reached critical mass, making it almost impossible for anyone to displace it. Its corporate customers buy LinkedIn "seats", which give them access to the proprietary recruitment tools. LinkedIn estimates that there are 200,000 potential corporate accounts, meaning that so far it has just 15pc penetration.

During 2014, LinkedIn started to build the foundations for entering the Chinese market. It is still in the very early stages, with the focus on building individual registrations. However, this venture is a significant mid to long-term opportunity.

Demandware, a business that builds and manages e-commerce solutions for large brands, is another attractive company. At its core, Demandware provides online stores for its customers. Large brands are able to avoid the expense of building their own custom e-commerce capability and the associated maintenance costs of keeping it relevant and up to date.

The Demandware service scales in accordance with traffic to the site, without the need for intervention from the customer. For example, Black Friday 2014 brought five times the amount of traffic as the previous year - this could crash a website that was unable to adjust dynamically.

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Tableau, a provider of data visualisation technology, is a further exciting opportunity. It was conceived as a response to traditional "business intelligence" tools, which deal only with structured, pre-formatted data and produce static reports.

Tableau has spawned a new category of tool known as "self-service" data discovery, where business users can take data from any source and manipulate it easily and flexibly. The firm currently has sales of approximately $350m, but is growing revenues at over 60pc a year.

By their very nature, new growth technologies can take time to prove successful, and it should be no surprise that share price performance can also be uneven. We expect last year's rotation into older, familiar names, such as Microsoft, to reverse. These companies are still struggling with the new technology world of the cloud and mobility, while more dynamic names are embracing innovation.

Relatively cheaper growth stocks will return and lead the sector higher.

Who is Mark Hawtin?

Mark Hawtin is investment director at GAM, and manages a number of technology portfolios including the £500m GAM Star Technology fund. Launched in 2011, the fund has beaten its tech sector rivals and benchmark in the three calendar years 2012, 2013 and 2014, giving an average annual return of 15pc.

Fund analyst Morningstar rates Mr Hawtin as "highly experienced".

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