A little while ago I reported on the exciting happenings taking place at the Internet World trade show in Earls Court. Well, I say exciting, but it's all relative I guess. The main topic of debate in the content management arena seemed to be the suitability or otherwise of many big-name, big-brand products to enterprise requirements.

Enterprise IT shoppers were warned by various experts that they should not necessarily go with the big boys because their products may not be a good fit for many of them, and are likely to be costly, unwieldy and require lengthy implementations. Instead, IT managers were advised to clearly establish their requirements and then seek out those vendors whose products provide the best fit. Not that these experts were slagging off the IBMs and Documentums per se; it was more a polite suggestion that buying from a big vendor will not necessarily meet all your content management needs, despite the claims that may have been made by said vendor.

Well, now a perfect example of what they were talking about - a smallish vendor operating in a very specialised segment is accruing some rather impressive customers like Scottish and Newcastle, Virgin and Barclays. Now document management is probably one of the least sexy areas of possibly the least sexy technology field ever - content management - but with its Omnidox product, Stortext could well be on to something.

Perhaps most importantly, it's an on-demand product; if anything is going to encourage firms to take a chance on a smaller company like this, it's going to be the delivery model. On-demand, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, whatever you want to call it, has long been hailed for its low start-up costs, low overheads and impressive RoI and nowhere is this more telling than in the content management space.

Stortext's Mark Iveson told me that the figures alone are persuading some big names to jump on board. And it makes sense - if you're spending upwards of 100k on software, licenses, servers, maintenance etc etc, you might well look for simpler alternatives. Another benefit, as he said, is that new functionality can be turned on at any time, for all of your users, removing the nasty business of upgrade paths every three years. And features can be hidden or otherwise according to role, so users are not lumbered with a whole heap of functionality that is neither relevant or useful.

Now, I'm no SaaS evangelist, but it will be interesting to see if any of the big content management vendors take a leaf out of Stortext's book and start to roll-out on-demand versions of their products.