This week I led a seminar in Rome on Web Content Management organized by our friends Giovanni and Francesca at Technology Transfer. Both during the seminar sessions and in the ever-important espresso breaks, a key theme that I had noted on other recent visits re-emerged: European web teams are struggling to meet contemporary needs with outdated "enterprise-level" technologies.

For those of us who look at websites with a professional eye, time spent surfing the web in Europe reveals a high degree of sophistication in terms of design, navigation, and underlying technical complexity. In large part this is due to the more advanced (compared to North America) nature of mobile technologies and interactive media, and correspondingly high user expectations.

From what I can see, traditional enterprise-level WCM offerings that were implemented by European customers in 2000-2003 period are showing real signs of age. As such, larger enterprises with complex, multi-site requirements are now looking for replacement technology, but are frustrated at what they find currently available in the marketplace. As Web CMS Report readers know, the largest WCM vendors have tended to focus their development efforts on delivering SOA options and chasing the ECM dream, rather than aggressively addressing the needs of the next generation of WCM. It's a bad situation that is further compounded by the fact that at the enterprise-level there are no European vendors to chose from -- though we follow a plethora of local options at every tier below.

Just as Vignette and Interwoven were leaders of the first generation of WCM technology (followed by Documentum, particularly in Europe) there is clearly an opportunity for a new generation WCM vendor to emerge and take advantage of a hungry market. Today's customer in Europe wants:

• Powerful multi-site management capabilities
• High scalability at a component level
• Suitability for localization, globalization,and multi-language deployments
• Easy ingest and integration of content and site structures from legacy WCM environments
• Extremely sophisticated rendering and publishing capabilities
• Solid lifecyle management for web content

It's a tough combination of requirements for any single vendor, but most of the Upper Tier and Mid-market players are working to get there.