During the first half of its existence, the company sold high-performance x86- and PowerPC-based motherboards (manufactured by IBM) as either aftermarket upgrades for consumers or for OEMs to put in their own computer systems.

[4] Yu had previously considered Solectron and SCI Systems as manufacturers of their motherboards but ultimately turned to IBM for their more rigorous testing services and three-year warranty program.

The motherboard was equipped with the 486SLC2 clocked at 66 MHz, featured eight ISA slots (two with VLB extensions), and was upgradable to 16 MB of RAM.

[8]: 27  In August 1993, Alaris announced the fully 32-bit Cougar motherboard, which came equipped with IBM's "Blue Lightning" 486BL processor clocked at 75 MHz (25 MHz internal bus) onto a socket supporting an optional aftermarket Pentium OverDrive, seven ISA expansion slots (two with VLB expansions, one of which is preoccupied with a VLB disk controller card), and an i387SX math coprocessor.

[6]: 38 In April 1994, Alaris introduced the successor to the original Leopard, the Leopard Plus, which shipped with the same 486SLC2 processor clocked at 66 MHz but put it on a Pentium OverDrive socket like the Cougar and added an additional VLB slot, a flash-upgradable BIOS ROM, a COAST slot for extra processor cache, and optimized support for the company's EnergySmart power conservation software.

[25]: 80 In 1996, Alaris began shifting away from motherboard and graphics card design in favor of developing software for compressing digital video into file sizes and bitrates appropriate for the computer hardware of the time.

[26] That year, the company hired Ilya Asnis, an immigrant of Saint Petersburg who developed a software package capable of transcoding video into very small file sizes, appropriate for sending via email as attachments.

[32][33] In August 1996, Alaris developed a professional version of the Videogram software aimed at the industrial Web video streaming market.

[34][35][36] Alaris briefly returned to the computer system market after announcing that they had signed on to produce a PowerPC motherboard based on Motorola's Yellowknife reference design in November 1996.