The industry shift away from proprietary switches and routers is pushing backbone connectivity kingpin Cisco further beyond the data center to the edge of the network, where it’s now taking aim at the $7.3 trillion opportunity to provide analytics for the Internet of Things. The company has embarked on a mission to bring intelligence from behind the firewall to the end-point where the action is happening.

Cisco hopes to accomplish this with a newly inaugurated portfolio of data crunching solutions that unifies existing and future products under a common direction in a move reminiscent of its March plan to build a billion-dollar cloud of clouds, an effort to monetize the industry’s other hottest trend. Connected Analytics builds on that investment to process information at the edge of the network to make decisions faster.

In essence, Cisco’s pitch is that shuttling all data back and forth to servers for analysis frustrates real-time decision making. It proposes to move more analysis to the edge of the network – such as in point-of-sale devices and machine sensors – and crunch the data there.

Cisco is promising to help practitioners tap into data from hardware sensors for a closer view of infrastructure so that users can get warning when a router or a switch is about to encounter difficulties, for example. That sensory output can also be useful for mapping traffic growth and planing upgrades, Cisco said.

There’s top-line potential as well. The Connected Analytics portfolio makes it possible for companies in verticals such as retail to correlate data from inventory management systems with point-of-sale information to optimize promotions or product placements. For call centers, Cisco is promising to generate service recommendations that can improve customer satisfaction, by improving on-the-spot decision making.

That value proposition is centered on Cisco’s proprietary IOx operating system, underscoring its broader effort to resist the industry trend towards open-source networking that has already swept up Juniper Systems Inc., Brocade Communications Systems Inc. and other top rivals. The company has not completely ignored the open-source phenomenon – it recently released the code for a homegrown security framework that leverages Apache Storm to filter traffic in real-time – but the core of its strategy remains proprietary for the time being.

The company faces tough competition from established vendors in both cloud computing and analytics, but Cisco has a power brand, a loyal customer base and a novel message.

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