History 2001: Larry Boucher Leaves Adaptec Abruptly

In an unusually brief press release (6 lines), Adaptec has announced that chairman Larry B. Boucher had resigned from the company “to devote more time and attention to his position of president and CEO of Alacritech.”

The only parting sentiment: “We will miss his contributions to Adaptec,” from president and CEO Bob Stephens. It’s not much.

Boucher, after all, was the founder in 1981 of this important storage firm, taking it public in 1986 and serving as CEO for 6 years, before taking it over the billion dollar mark in 1988, becoming chairman in 1999.

It was he too who started Auspex Systems in 1987, which pioneered NAS technology. Recall also that after a 12-year career in IBM’s San Jose-based storage division, he led an engineering team at Shugart Associates that developed the SCSI interface in 1979.

Last May, the SCSI Trade Association bestowed him with its SCSI founder award for his contributions to the interface’s standard.

“Mr. SCSI” is now involved in iSCSI, at the head of Alacritech, which he also founded in 1997. The company, which has already raised $22 million, is preparing a TCP/IP accelerator to boost performance of servers, NAS and iSCSI storage devices. It is possible to infer that Adaptec’s business activities, also pointing in the direction of iSCSI, are in direct competition with those of Alacritech.

Perhaps, but Boucher still deserved more than 6 lines.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 162 on July 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.