Is it really much different? In the data flow you're just conceptually moving the network from being after the agent to being before the agent. You can still have the cache in the same spot, it's just that the agent is hitting it directly now instead of over the network.
As far as the actual data access goes, it is equivalent, but you can't cache the agent process itself. So every agent is potentially repeating work centrally, rather than spreading that load out to each client. That may still be a worthwhile win, but it is a new burden on the data centre.
