Costa Mesa’s Emulex Corp., a maker of electronics that speed up the flow of data on corporate storage networks, promoted its operations chief to the No. 2 spot.
Emulex said on Thursday it bumped up Jeff Benck to the president and chief operating officer post. He was hired on in 2008 as senior vice president and operations chief.
Benck oversees the company’s engineering, marketing, business development, operations and sales organization.
He also helps with corporate strategy and is focused on diversifying the Emulex product portfolio.
Although the promotion is a subtle one, it puts Benck clearly in line as the next in line to Emulex’s Chief Executive John McCluney.
McCluney had served as chief operating officer under chairman and former chief executive Paul Folino.
Until Benck was hired, there wasn’t a chief operating officer at Emulex for a few years.
Before landing at Emulex, Benck was recruited from IBM Corp. to take a similar post at Aliso Viejo’s QLogic Corp., a top Emulex rival.
He left after less than a year over the timing of what was then a planned succession to take over as chief executive.
QLogic Chief Executive H.K. Desai is still heading the company that he started and has run for some 15 years.
Benck spent 18 years at Big Blue, most recently heading its blade server division.
He has a master’s in technology management from the University of Miami.
Benck has a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he played NCAA Division III varsity basketball.
He also holds six U.S. patents.
Benck lives in Orange County with his wife Nina and two daughters, Gabrielle and Gracyn.
In a separate announcement on Wednesday, Emulex completed its acquisition of Sunnyvale’s ServerEngines Corp. for about $159 million in cash, debt and stock.
The two companies have close ties.
Emulex worked with ServerEngines a few years ago to break into a market known as converged networking.
Emulex’s converged network adapters—circuit boards with chips that bring the speed of specialized data networks to everyday networks of servers and desktop computers—contain ServerEngines’ Ethernet chips.
Converged networking is seen as the biggest development in corporate networks in years.
ServerEngines was founded in 2004 by former Broadcom Corp. engineers who came to the chipmaker when it bought Silicon Valley’s ServerWorks for $1.8 billion in 2001.
In 2004, Vegesna and the other founders of ServerWorks—Sujith Arramreddy, technology chief, and Sai Gadiraju, head of engineering—founded ServerEngines and funded the company themselves.
Emulex had a recent market value of about $718 million.
