This year has seen Cisco pushing itself into almost every aspect of the internet of things (IoT) network, from cloud platforms to home gateways and connectivity standards. This week, it has turned its attention to the way all the data from those ‘things’ is analyzed and harnessed, with its most ambitious big data play to date. This relies on being able to capture and analyze data almost anywhere, playing to Cisco’s strengths in distributed systems. While early cloud computing was all about centralized data centers, the future introduction of billions of objects to the mix is shifting attention to the network and the edge, where most processing will need to take place. Cisco coined the term ‘fog computing’, which sees…