Our research addresses ?information appliances? used in modern large-scale distributed systems to: (1) virtualize their data flows by applying actions such as filtering, format translation, etc., and (2) separate such actions from enterprise applications? business logic, to make it easier for future service-oriented codes to inter-operate in diverse and dynamic environments. Our specific contribution is the enrichment of runtimes of these appliances with methods for QoS-awareness, thereby giving them the ability to deliver desired levels of QoS even under sudden requirement changes -- IQ-appliances. For experimental evaluation, we prototype an IQ-appliance. Measurements demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the approach.