The Business was never interested in raw data. Their interaction with data has always been through applications. These applications massaged the data and presented the result to the user. It was becoming clear that simple Web-database integration was not going to address this issue. The enterprise not only needed integrated data, but integrated applications.
Application development is nothing new in the computer industry.
The requirements placed on the application were new. A word processor is an application. The expectation used to be that you can use such an application to type a document, perform formatting operations, save and retrieve files and print the finished document. Today, the word processor is expected to interact with the network and the data and applications that reside on the network. Furthermore, some argue that the application itself, should be on the network.