Executive Seeks Old Challenges of Risk, Profit

Fred Cox, an Orange County technology veteran who last year retired from day-to-day management of Emulex Corp. after running the company for over a decade, said Tuesday that he is going back to his entrepreneurial roots.

Cox, 57, has become president of a small software company, Caseware Inc. in Costa Mesa, which is developing a computer program that helps large teams of software engineers work together to create software applications.

Sol Zechter, a former Emulex vice president who retired in March, is a co-investor with Cox in Caseware. He will be its chairman.

“This company needed some investment to get to market, and it needs to execute its fundamental plan,” Cox said. “Since we pulled back, Sol and I have been looking for investments in the local area.”

Cox will retain his title as chairman of Emulex Corp., a Costa Mesa manufacturer of computer components which he co-founded in 1979. The company, which grew to revenue in excess of $120 million a year, has recently fallen on hard times. It laid off 60 employees last month.

Cox resigned his role as chief executive in June, 1990, and helped the company find a successor, Robert N. Stephens, a former executive at Western Digital Corp. who took the Emulex post a year ago. Since then, Cox has reduced his role in management.

At Caseware, Cox and Zechter will have controlling interest. They succeed two brothers, David and Steve Bernhardt, who founded the company in 1978. The company began developing software for the computer-aided software engineering market several years ago.

Caseware now employs 15 people. Cox said he expects the company to launch a new product in the first quarter of 1992 for computer workstations that run on Unix, the operating system that is dominant in the engineering industry.

He added that Caseware’s products will not compete with Emulex, which makes computer-storage products.

“We think it will be a growth company,” Cox said. “I wouldn’t get involved with it otherwise.”