In the fast-growing market for CRM software, European vendors are much weaker than their North American-and especially US-rivals. Pioneers, such as Siebel, Onyx Software and Clarify, were the first to develop systems that capture sales leads and automate call centres.

With the internet boom of the late-1990s, this trend continued with a new generation of systems designed to manage customer interactions over web-based channels.

SAP is the only European vendor that has tried to take on the US and Canadian vendors which dominate the industry. After a difficult start, the company's CRM strategy is starting to pay-off. SAP experienced 50 per cent growth in sales of its CRM products in each of the past two financial quarters.

The Gartner Group believes SAP is the only company that can challenge Siebel, the US company that is the undisputed industry leader.

As well as a dominant language and homogeneous market, US vendors benefit hugely from an American business culture in which the customer is king. Europe is more complex and its diversity of cultures and languages requires different customers to be handled in different ways.

Another problem is that many European businesses remain unsure what CRM can do for them. According to a recent survey by IDC, nearly one-third of European businesses are not interested in CRM, although more than half said it was of critical importance.

The vendors want to educate European businesses that are suspicious of CRM technology. "When we send in salespeople we try not to talk about CRM-instead, we talk about the core benefits," says Bob Runge, chief marketing officer of Pivotal, a Canadian vendor which has offices across Europe.

One particular strength of European vendors is the fast-growing area of wireless CRM applications. Aberdeen, the IT market analyst, says Europe has a 12-month lead over its North American rivals.

One successful wireless CRM vendor is eWare, based in Dublin, Ireland, which has grown on the back of Europe's booming wireless market. It recently signed a ·1m distribution deal with Japanese trading house Mitsui to sell its technology in Japan. In the US, eWare is represented by Computer Associates, which integrates eWare technology with its own CRM offering.

EWare has purposely not built a direct sales presence in these big markets. None the less, it is keen to expand so as to avoid being typecast as another European "niche vendor" with strong technology but little recognition outside its domestic market.

Alan Wyley, eWare's chief operating officer, hopes to find a compromise between the two extremes. "Other CRM vendors are either 'niche Europeans' or they expand too fast and try to take on the world," he says.