By Justin Fox

(FORTUNE, June 12) -- Jac Peeris, a former Bain consultant who launched her job-training dot-com in London a few months ago, feels like she's at the heart of the business-to-business Internet action. "If you talk about global B2B e-commerce, I believe Europe is the battleground," says Peeris, CEO of Skillvest.com. This is a common sentiment these days in European Internet circles. In contrast to earlier waves of Internet commerce and content, Europe is ready to hold its own in business-to-business trade.

"B2B is different--it's emerging here at the same time as in the U.S.," says Mark Suster, CEO of BuildOnline.com, a construction-supplies marketplace that started in Ireland in 1998 and is now expanding all over Europe. "Of the four largest online players in construction materials in the U.S., two beat us to market and two didn't. They don't have enough people yet to move into Europe." Even if they did, they might be flummoxed by a market that spans many laws, languages, and currencies. "It's not easy to run a business over here when you come from an environment where size is all that counts," says Peeris.

It's worth mentioning that Peeris is Canadian and Suster American, but their point is valid. It's hard to imagine a U.S. B2B company pushing aside, say, Pan European Fish Auctions, a Belgian company that since 1998 has allowed companies to trade mackerel, herring, and the like in six languages.

Still, it's not clear that the marketplace business is such a spectacular one to be in. And the probably more lucrative field of providing the hardware, software, and services needed to do business online remains mostly in the hands of U.S. companies--with SAP being the one big exception.

In the end, the real test will be how effectively European corporations use the Net to make themselves tougher competitors. And while it's hard to find anyone on the European side of the Atlantic as advanced as Cisco or Dell, neither are Europe's corporate leaders ignoring the B2B challenge. Every major European automaker has either signed up with the GM- and Ford-led automotive marketplace or set up its own; big European companies in the chemical, oil, utility, retail, telecom, and consumer-products industries have all recently announced marketplace plans. Says Sergio Giacoletto, Oracle's senior vice president of business solutions for Europe: "Almost every CEO and board of a large company in Europe is thinking about it."