Recently, IBM and Cisco said they are working together to bring business analytics to the edge of the network. The collaboration is meant to offer companies operating in bandwidth-constrained environments more options for gaining insight into connected equipment.

Mike Flannagan, VP and general manager for Cisco's data and analytics group, in a blog post said that businesses with intermittent network connectivity can now take advantage of cloud computing and analytics by eliminating the need to transmit nonessential data. "The combination of these technical capabilities provides the flexibility of processing and analyzing data everywhere, at the edge and in the cloud, so it can be leveraged in time and context as the business needs to use it," he said