Certain example embodiments relate to the concept of controlling the flow of data by providing an intelligent flow controller/manager, and a client-side component for the selection of a communication channel from a pool, and having these components communicate to regulate data flow through gateways to a broker- and/or other-type secondary stage. Data fragmentation and reassembly can be used to increase performance, e.g., through self-regulating behaviors. Advantageously, reliability is improved by enabling in-memory data persistence, rather than resorting to potentially performance-degrading use of disk storage. The delivery mechanism may be used to deliver data to multiple consumers, providing an end-to-end sender-to-consumer solution that self-regulates to optimize the data flow while still being reliable.