Mike,
>Do you know a lot of companies these days who WANT local data storage? I don't. That train left the station a few years ago, unless you're talking about the mom and pops.
I'm talking about options and having available the maximum flexibility in designing apps and not being locked into just one way of accessing data via data providers. I'm not saying that every business would want their mission-critical data in "local data" storage but that there are many cases where having that option for even some of the data can be a plus, especially apps that have to import and manipulate data from many sources and in many formats before putting it into a more permanent backend database.