IBM this week announced its MessageSight appliance at its Impact 2012 conference. It's going to be an important element in IBM's "Internet of Things" strategy, says IBM, and is built to handle the message volumes generated by Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) technology, the protocol IBM open-sourced in late 2011 for M2M use.

As we all read and hear plug after plug for SDH/NFV, advocacy of an appliance like this somewhat jars. That's because we know that in another part of the forest IBM, which of course is a big SDN/NFV supporter with its fingers in many pies including the recently-announced OpenDaylight project, is bound to be simultaneously making the opposite case for commodity hardware and function virtualisation.

On the face of it, processing millions messages coming from all over the network is just the sort of application NFV is supposed to be able to handle with aplomb.

I guess the reality is that appliances will be around for ages and will still be preferable for many applications and in many circumstances... it's just that picking through an argument that says you need a customised appliance to deliver adequate horsepower seems so last year.