I like to look at architecture diagrams. From those architectures, we can see how the vendors try to present their offerings in a simple and elegant way. It seems not fair to judge them only from the diagrams without looking at their implementations. While, they do tell us a lot.

describes WebSphere product family into 4 users groups: business users, business managers and business-operations personnel, business analysts and "process engineers and integration specialists". It is quite nice to see that they list "integration specialists" as a special user group as that group plays very important part when implementing the whole BPM solution.

  embedded their 3 main products into process lifecycles. it is clear enough to help people remember their products: SOA suite, BPM suite and Middleware.

tried to tell too much on this diagram. The information involves process lifecycle, users group and even the product screen shots. But I guess that is the way they tell. Eventually, what remained in mind is highlighted 6 steps.

  could not give less that that. The whole picture needs more information about the products. It only shows the abstract concept about process, SOA and middleware.

highlights very well about their universal adapters efforts. The diagram shows different platforms, different service layers and different systems.

made a good wrap up about their ESB platform, which is a service bus focused platform with BPM functions. At the same time, the platform works with legacy application infrastructure and offer services to the clients.

  created a nice picture. It explains very well about their production function of data distribution as it targets the data integration problem: from reference data system to the front office, middle office or back office with on-demand transformation.