When a financial institution cut partner integration time by 40% by migrating from SOAP to REST, they weren't just swapping protocols. They were dismantling an entire organizational layer. The integration architects who once served as "the ultimate support escalation point" for their service-oriented architecture found their expertise less central to daily operations. Consumer tech companies building REST-first architectures often didn't create the role at all.

What looked like a standards battle was actually an organizational fork. Do you structure engineering around specialists who manage complexity, or distribute that capability across product teams?

What the Specialists Managed

SOAP environments required dedicated expertise because working with SOAP in JavaScript meant "writing a ton of code to perform simple tasks." You had to create the required XML structure every time. Integration architects spent their days:

• Designing service contracts and WSDL definitions
• Handling message-level security that didn't terminate at server boundaries
• Ensuring transaction reliability where messages were delivered once and only once
• Maintaining compliance guarantees for healthcare and banking systems

The specialization made sense in enterprises with stable integration contracts and stringent requirements. Healthcare systems needed HIPAA-compliant message handling and audit trails baked into the protocol. Banking required different but equally rigorous compliance guarantees.

The specialization also created a coordination tax. Product teams couldn't ship new integrations without going through the architects. Every API change required updating WSDL contracts and coordinating across teams.

How REST Collapsed the Role

Roy Fielding's 2000 dissertation described something fundamentally different: straightforward HTTP methods that any web developer already understood. GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. No specialized knowledge required.

A Forrester analyst observed that REST was simply "friendlier and easier to understand" if you were a web developer.

Companies that needed velocity chose the architecture that let product teams own their integrations end-to-end. Consumer web startups, mobile-first platforms. When a retailer migrated to REST, they reduced new sales channel development from months to weeks. Integration work moved from specialists to product teams.

The integration architect role didn't vanish everywhere. Banks and insurance companies kept them because message-level security and transaction guarantees justified the coordination cost. Even in those environments, though, the economics shifted. REST's smaller learning curve reduced the time developers needed to document and maintain applications.

What Was Lost

REST's organizational victory created its own cascade. When integration expertise distributed across product teams, deep protocol knowledge disappeared. Teams built APIs quickly but inconsistently.

Security patterns that integration architects once enforced became each team's problem to solve. Proper authentication flows, rate limiting strategies, error handling standards.

The wider ecosystem of REST tools made development faster but also more fragmented. Without specialists maintaining coherent integration patterns, companies discovered they'd traded coordination tax for governance complexity. APIs proliferated without oversight. When authentication needed to cascade across domains or rate limiting required sophisticated strategies, the distributed model showed its limits. Teams faced complexity that integration architects once absorbed.

The Fork Replays

Building enterprise web agents, we encounter this organizational question constantly. When a customer asks whether to centralize web automation expertise or distribute monitoring capabilities across product teams, they're replaying the SOAP/REST fork.

Centralized teams can handle the complexity of making browser automation reliable across thousands of sites, understanding how authentication flows cascade across domains, managing rate limiting at scale. They also create a bottleneck.

Distributed teams enable velocity. Product teams own their monitoring workflows end-to-end. That requires infrastructure that abstracts the hard parts: observability so teams understand what broke, typed contracts so automation stays predictable, codified learning so complexity doesn't compound.

The decision depends on whether your organization's coordination costs justify the specialization. Most companies inherited REST's organizational model without realizing it came from a standards battle two decades ago. They structure teams around the assumption that integration is something any developer can do. An assumption that works until you hit the edges of what simple APIs can handle.

The integration architect disappeared because REST made the role unnecessary for most use cases. The underlying tension remains: every automation decision surfaces that same organizational fork.