Reuters and Cisco push protocols for fast multicasting

Reuters and Cisco have pledged to work together to develop next-generation internet protocols for multicasting. The development could signal the corporate rehabilitation of push technology.

David Meads, Cisco's regional manager for investment banking, said: "Muliticast and push technology middleware will give our financial clients fast and economical access to information."

Meads added that push technology could be used to send latest stock prices, news and other market data to traders' desks.

Cisco is a minority shareholder in Tibco Software, a Reuters subsidiary that develops software for corporate networks. Cisco and Tibco are together putting forward Pretty Good Multicast to the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Cisco is also building the functionality to incorporate Tibco Rendezvous middleware into its range of Catalyst Lan switches.

Much-heralded when it first arrived, push technology promised to deliver time-sensitive information over the internet, but ended up jamming corporate networks with too much irrelevant data.

Tibco software claims to solve this problem by using a technique called IP Multicasting.