Benjamin F.

Benjamin F. Kuo is the founder of SOCALTECH LLC, and the publisher of socalTECH.com. Kuo initially started socalTECH.com as a hobby, looking to highlight Southern California's diverse and growing high tech industry. Kuo has been active in supporting Southern California's high tech industry, and hasserved on the selection committee of the Los Angeles Venture Association's Annual Venture Capital awards, served as a judge on the Software Council of Southern California's Software Industry Awards, and is active in many other efforts promoting Southern California's technology industry. Kuo has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and has worked in a variety of management and development positions at high tech firms in both Southern and Northern California. Outside of his efforts with socalTECH, Kuo has served in a number of technical and marketing positions in the high tech industry. Most recently, he was a Product Manager at QLogic, Inc. in Westlake Village, and has served in a wide variety of roles at Troika Networks, Inc., a venture-backed startup which was successfully acquired by QLogic in 2005. At Troika, Kuo served as a Senior Product Marketing Manager, Software Development Manager, Standards Representative to T11 and other industry groups, and was instrumental in the company's storage area networking product development. Prior to QLogic and Troika, he worked at IBM San Jose, Micropolis Corp, Echelon Corp. in Palo Alto, and Paracel Inc. in Pasadena. Kuo has been a regular contributor to Storage Magazine and is an author of the book Building SANs with Brocade Fibre Channel Switches, published in 2002. He has also contributed articles to the C/C++ Journal, Multimedia System Design, SysAdmin Magazine, and The Fruit Gardener. Kuo has been active in storage industry standardization organizations, and was co-chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association's highly successful HBA API efforts, and was responsible for drafting the specification and helping to drive industry adoption of the standard. He has also served as an officer of the NCITS T11.5 Fabric Applications Interface Standard (FAIS) efforts and has been active in other T11 and SNIA standards efforts.