Microsoft, Alacritech, and Broadcom announced late yesterday that the three companies had reached agreements that settle all outstanding lawsuits between Alacritech and Microsoft, and provide Broadcom and Microsoft with access to Alacritech's patent portfolio. Alacritech created scalable networking technologies that Microsoft intends to use in its new networking stack (codenamed TCP Chimney) for a future Windows Server 2003 update.
"Customers are looking for high performance, seamless and secure networking, and Microsoft's networking initiatives will advance the functionality and scalability of the Windows platform," said Jawad Khaki, the vice president of Windows Networking and Devices at Microsoft. "Today's agreement ensures Microsoft customers and partners will be able to realize improved application, server and network performance."
With the cross-licensing in place, Microsoft is free to add Alactritech's technology to the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003, a Windows Server 2003 Feature Pack that the company plans to ship in early 2006. "TCP Chimney will increase the performance of I/O intensive applications such as backup/restore, networked storage, high performance computing, multi-processor web servers, Exchange Servers and others," the company noted in a statement.
