We're thinking of using Zope for a rather big project and because of that I wanted to ask if there are some references where Zope is used in a bigger environment.
The best examples are really the ones on Zope.org in the case studies. Not a lot of numbers but a few.
Also I would be interested in which companies in Germany are doing consulting for Zope and the like.
Check the references area of Zope.org
We need this to have some arguments against other technologies. Are there maybe any benchmarks between Zope and Websphere or similar servers?
Here is one against Apache's Jakarta Tomcat. http://www.zope.org/Members/BwanaZulia/zope_benchmarks/benchmarks.html It should give you some idea but a big warning in benchmarking: The more the server does the slower it will be. Zope is doing a ton of stuff besides just serving up content so make sure that what you compare it to can/is doing the same stuff. Cheers, J