Alacritech was founded in 1997 by Larry Boucher, the author of the SCSI standard and founder of both Auspex Systems and Adaptec. The company's network interface cards (NICs) were promoted for enhanced performance by moving some TCP/IP processing from the CPU to the NIC. In 2004, Alacritech sued Microsoft and Broadcom for patent infringement. The suits were settled in 2005 with both companies agreeing to license the Alacritech patents.[citation needed]
In 2008 Alacritech decided that the TOE / NIC business was not sufficient to sustain a viably growing company, and changed its focus to leveraging this technology for accelerating of network attached storage (NAS), resulting in the development of the ANX series of appliances.
