Forgive me if this is a bit grandmother-sucking-eggs stuff, but have you thought about the risk profile of your ECM investments recently? I would normally have thought, and I think a good many IT buyers think similarly, that the safest options lie with the big boys - the IBMs, Oracles and EMCs of this world. Well, in the world of content management, that's not necessarily the case.

A new report by analyst CMS Watch - yes, sorry to harp on about them again but as independents they don't really have many peers in the business - suggested that actually you may be better off opting for a smaller, mid-tier player. Why? Well, according to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, the report author, many of the large vendors in this space are still undergoing costly, timely eye-off-the-ball type integrations of recent acquisitions - think IBM and FileNet for example. Another reason is that some, like Oracle, are still finding their way in the area, having only relatively recently entered the ECM market. What that means for IT buyers is change, and that is never a particularly reassuring trend among your suppliers, least of all in the current climate.

Another advantage of the mid market vendors is that they generally tend to do one thing and do it well, rather than try the all things to all people approach. This means that you may accrue a whole load of point products of course, but that's kind of how people buy ECM technologies anyway, according to Pelz-Sharpe, and it's easy to see why. Pressure on IT is usually such that it's pretty difficult to sit back and look at the long-term, big strategic picture. That would be the ideal of course, but if your finance department is screaming because they need a quick fix to a workflow forms-related issue, you kind of have to suck it up and just support the business.

So I guess the advice of the week is take a look at the smaller players, because in the long run it may be in your best interests; in this economic climate you have to be as risk averse as possible, and that could mean putting your eggs in a smaller vendor's basket.