Sounds more like a company power play between the IT and another department. Happens often. The IT wants to increase it's staff by one DBA.

Foxpro is a very robust data programming application. I use it for processing millions of records in a medical claims and members environment. As for multiuser it has some intelligence built in as well as your own multprocessing and buffering code. Using SQL Server as a backend is a matter of preferrence and Client/Server programming. You'll need licensces for SQL Server, ODBC, Net Library, and a Data Base Administrator. You do not need all these for a FoxPro application, which could be on a Novell network or Microsoft network.

If you want enterprize applications the n-tier methodology comes into play and then it depends upon whether your application is a fat client, thin client or a little of both (where are your business rules). Obviously with the business rules on the server side you have only to change the rules (stored procedures, triggers) in one place vice each client instance of your app. Then the network traffic becomes a consideration in large networks. For an enterprize application with business rules on the server, a database manager like SQL Server is needed.

Just a few commments...