Building a geographically distributed application

You are the new technical architect at a large custom home building firm with offices in North America, South America, and Europe. Your firm is expanding, both by opening new offices and by buying smaller custom home builders. Although each main geographic region stores its own data in its own systems, your CIO wants you to build an application that displays information from each region in different widgets on a dashboard. She does not want SQL queries run from the corporate office where the dashboard will be hosted.

You will have to deploy some software in the various regions. What will the software do?
What are some primary concerns of building an ASP.NET MVC application that gathers information from such disparate sources?
What is the benefit of adding Windows Azure AppFabric?