(Getty/Mario Tama)

By now, you've probably heard of cloud computing.

That's where companies rent shared software, computers, and storage instead of buying and installing it all themselves. They pay for their usage via subscriptions, accessing it over the internet.

Cloud computing is all the rage right now, on track to be a $10 billion business for Amazon in 2016; Microsoft hopes it will become a $20 billion business by 2018, and Google thinks it will become bigger than its internet ad business by 2020.

So what comes after the cloud? If you ask Cisco, it's something called "fog computing."

Last month, Cisco was joined by other industry leaders including Intel, Microsoft, ARM, Dell, and Microsoft to back a new "fog computing" consortium, the OpenFog initiative. It sounds like something straight from a Saturday Night Live parody skit, but it's not.

Later this month, the consortium is holding a conference at Princeton University. Princeton is leading the research into fog computing.

Why Cisco wants this

So what exactly is it? To understand fog computing, you first have to understand cloud computing. In cloud computing, everyone shares the same massive data centers. You run an app on your phone in your home town, but the back-end computers may be in Virginia, or California, or Ireland, etc.

(Thomson Reuters)

But with fog computing, computers and storage are scattered all over, perhaps placed closer to the app's users. The network is smart enough to know where the data is stored.

With the network as the star, you can see why Cisco is championing this idea. It means selling a lot more high-end, very profitable network equipment to connect a lot more computers and data centers.

Cisco has been largely left out of the cloud computing revolution.

As its customers move to the cloud, they need to buy less networking equipment. Meanwhile, some of the biggest cloud operators, like Facebook and Microsoft, have invented their own, new low-cost network equipment.

As for the rest of the traditional IT players (Intel, Dell, Microsoft, ARM), if "fog computing" takes off they stand to gain, too. Lots of computers scattered everywhere means selling lots of computer servers and operating systems and chips.

Will it take hold?

Just because it's in Cisco's self-interest to promote fog computing, doesn't mean it won't be a real thing someday.

(Dronestagram/Ricardo Matiello)

The name "fog" is new, but the general concept isn't. It used to be called "distributed computing."

Years ago, the now defunct company called Sun Microsystems even had a slogan "the network is the computer." (Oracle bought Sun in 2010.)