E-business is the integration of core business systems with web technology. Broadly applied, it means conducting business over intranets, extranets, or the Internet. All enterprises, large and small, must be prepared for such competition. But accessing corporate information can be tricky. Querying or updating hostdatabases directly is not a complete solution.
Databases lack the business logic necessary for interpreting or manipulating data.
They provide only raw data, which is of no use to your customers. Furthermore, direct updates to databases can expose your data to corruption. Given these issues, a more practical approach is to focus on the mainframe applications that were written to deal with that data. The fact that there is two trillion dollars' worth of mainframe applications in corporations today housing approximately 70 percent of all critical business logic and data make them valuable resources to leverage. Internet Business Practice Aberdeen Group August 1999 Mainframe applications offer much more than raw data.