The Internet of Things is still very much a work in progress, and in all honesty no one really knows what shape it will ultimately take. While smart cars and homes are a pretty sure bet, it remains to be seen whether novelty gadgets like intelligent forks will catch on. One thing we do know about the Internet of Things however, is it’s going to be large, and it’s going to be very, very busy.

With that in mind, IBM has just announced a mysterious new appliance called MessageSight, a kind of Big Data control node for the Internet of Things that’ll help networks to manage the rising tide of data flooding in from all of our different web-connected gizmos and gadgets.

Apparently, we’re going to need just such an appliance, because data from IMS Research cited by IBM suggests that by 2020, there’ll be a whopping 22 billion such gizmos and gadgets in the world. What’s more, these devices will club together to generate an astounding 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (that’s 2.5 followed by eighteen zeros – LOTS of data, in other words) each day. Therefore, the Internet of Things will need to be backed by some new and extremely capable data-gobbling hardware to handle it all, so says IBM.

If the concept of the Internet of Things still escapes you, just imagine for a few moments, if you will, a future in which every single electrical device in your home and your car has its own internet connection, along with a sensor that feeds information to the web and your PC at home. Each of these devices will periodically ‘phone home’ as it were, keeping you up to date with their status and letting you know when the car tires need changing, when to take the garbage out, or when to go and buy some more milk. This technology exists right now, but one of the biggest challenges in implementing lies with processing all of that data.

This is where MessageSight comes in. The appliance uses the new Message Querying Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to harvest the expected flood of data that’s about to emerge. According to IBM, who has been pushing the protocol alongside companies like Red hat and Cisco, MQTT is a bit like the older HTTP, only it consumes far less power and its bandwidth demands are much less, making it an ideal solution for processing Big Data from the billions of new connected devices that are soon to be switched on.

In a nutshell, MessageSight is capable of process an awful lot of data, quickly and cheaply. IBM says that the appliance is able to support up to a million sensors or smart devices at any one time, handling up to 13 million messages a second, adding that “no previous technology has been able to handle this volume of messages and devices”.

All sounds very impressive, but for the average consumer this development probably won’t mean very much. Nevertheless, it’s a clear sign that some companies see a massive future for the Internet of Things, and perhaps, just perhaps, a very profitable one for whoever is best positioned to process the coming tsunami of Big Data its poised to create.