How Successful Financial Firms Use Both Reliable Multicast and TCP in Messaging or Is TCP Really All You Need for Messaging?

Successful financial firms use both TCP and reliable multicast messaging in their architectures for many reasons. Cisco and other network vendors support both unicast and multicast protocols with hardware designed to transmit either kind of message at wire speed. The authors see some vendors who want to believe that only TCP is good for messaging needs. The authors certainly agree that there are some messaging applications for which TCP is ideal, but the authors also know that there are some needs for which reliable multicast is far better. It's wise to be wary of vendors with limited offerings saying that they can solve any problem with just one solution.