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A patent-infringment suit was filed in federal court Wednesday against DATAllegro, a data-warehousing company that Microsoft announced plans to acquire last month. The suit alleges that DATAllegro's founder and chief executive, Stuart Frost, wrongly incorporated into the company's products intellectual property that he gleaned from a 2003 stint as CEO of a company called XPrime.

The complaint (PDF, 35 pages) was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego by Cary Jardin, the founder of XPrime, who was issued a patent in February 2007 for a "System and Method for Generating and Processing Results Data in a Distributed System." Jardin had filed for the patent at the time Frost worked at XPrime, according to the suit.

The suit alleges that the "unauthorized use of Jardin's intellectual property continues to this day."

With the acquisition still pending, Microsoft isn't named as a defendant in the suit. The Redmond company referred questions to DATAllegro, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif. DATAllegro didn't respond to requests for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Microsoft didn't disclose financial terms of the DATAllegro acquisition when it was announced last month. At the time, Microsoft executive Bob Muglia said the deal would give the company new capabilities in large-scale data storage. Muglia said Microsoft would move the DATAllegro technology onto its SQL Server and Windows platforms.

The deal would let Microsoft "compete for the highest-end enterprise data warehousing solutions," Muglia said at the time. "We've never been able to do that before."

The suit comes less than a month after the Microsoft acquisition was announced. Asked why the suit wasn't filed prior to the acquisition agreement, a representative of the law firm that filed the suit said via e-mail that "the issue was raised as soon as possible after thoroughly investigating the matter."