Let's Just Integrate-101

What do you mean by word 'integrate'?

Let's just google it, and see what it means: https://www.google.com/search?q=integrate
Probably, it says combine one to another to make a whole. [one 'integrate' one forms whole]. Though, there may be several other dimensions to this verb, which determines the one's and whole in an integration context.

Why you are writing about it?

Back in 2005, I started as an ERP consultant in Deloitte, and was soon pushed into system integration to work on various projects. In that space, we talked about source, target and mappings, so I guess we were integrating 2 one's [source, target], and mostly source and target with either different system / or applications. So I was working as an integrator on projects that were combining system / applications as a whole. I spend almost a decade learning 'how to integrate' and had quite a bit of fun doing it, plus I made a decent living.

A brief evolution of system and process integration?

A quick browse on D-Zone article by Fernando, can give a brief refresher, but trends like cloud, mobility, social, APIs and internet in general are creating a new ecosphere, which is beyond systems, applications and even enterprises.
https://dzone.com/articles/the-evolution-of-systems-integration
Just see the social platforms [Facebook, Linkedin..], mobile world [android, ios], cloud platforms [AWS, GCP, Azure] and millions of apps, system, business being build on these trends around the world in a connected integrated way.

What is your viewpoint on 'integration'?

With a decade of experience, I quite well understand that integrating systems and processes has been a complex challenge and companies spend millions on it if not billions. In the futuristic ecosphere, user personas will be integrated through social channels, home, cars, devices and machines will exist in the ecosphere through automation and cloud technologies, and we as professionals will have to keep learning at a rapid pace to keep reducing the integration debt, a part of technical debt.
I have seen a phase when professionals have created services, especially based on protocols like SOAP and Service Oriented Design principles and have standardized the approach to system integration in enterprise environments. Thomas Erl, has been a guru in defining SOA principles, and has written several papers and books. Enterprise companies have build strong products on the SOA Architecture to ease the integration pain.
Though, Roy Fielding has proposed REST, probably before SOAP, which defines the CRUD standard for internet APIs and has been the foundation for WEB APIs. It has been the approach to integrate on the internet, and has been heavily leveraged by internet companies, and now has been preferred over SOAP within the enterprise from past few years. REST is primarily being enabled with Microservices Architecture.