My first thought is flexibility and interoperability. If you have one tool, cross platform, that supports a wide variety of protocols, you can use it on both en

My first thought is flexibility and interoperability. If you have one tool, cross platform, that supports a wide variety of protocols, you can use it on both ends of a connection, and easily swap out protocols without having to: 1) install a new tool on both sides 2) learn a new API for each protocol 3) bug check for it It also let's you do all this dynamically, so switching protocols on the fly is trivial.