Emulex rustles up a Mulligan for its hungry network gumble floggers

Emulex has appointed a senior vice-president for operations, signalling new CEO Jeff Benck's intention to have his company survive as a viable business.

Emulex makes Fibre Channel storage host bus adapters (HBAs), Converged Network Adaptors (CNAs) and has recently bought Endace for its Ethernet network monitoring and analysis technology.

Perry Mulligan moves from being the senior veep of operations at Emulex's arch-rival QLogic, which he joined in 2007, to take up the same post at Benck's biz - so he knows the storage adapter business right down to the last nut and bolt in the supply chain.

Emulex and Qlogic are joint leaders in the HBA/CNA world and both have suffered as that market flattened. Previous attempts at diversification - such as InfiniBand gear and Fibre Channel switches on QLogic's part, or in-array silicon - have been relative disappointments. Both have made decisive moves to break out of the HBA/CNA ghetto, with Emulex buying Endace and QLogic starting up a line of flash-cached storage area network adapters.

Benck was Emulex's chief operations officer before assuming the CEO role earlier this month. He's moved quickly to get a new ops chief.

Emulex will announce its fourth quarter and full financial 2013 year results on 8 August. ®