Executive Team
Ray Kao, Chairman & CEO
Ray has over 20 years of experience in information technology industry, including 10 years of CEO & CTO responsibilities, and 10 years of senior engineering management and product design and development. Ray is also a seasoned entrepreneur with a good track record of developing innovative technologies into business. Before founding CipherMax, Ray was the Chairman and founding CEO of Polaris Networks, which provides new generation multiservice optical transport and switching solutions. Before founding Polaris Networks, Ray was the founder, CTO and VP of R&D of TransMedia Communications which delivered the industry's first carrier-class Voice over IP media gateway solution. The company was acquired by Cisco in September 1999. Before founding TransMedia, Ray was the chief architect at Stratacom/Cisco for several generations of multiservice switching products. Prior to Cisco, Ray was a key designer on various networking products at Digital Equipment Corporation.
Ray has received several awards and patents in the areas of high-performance multiservice and multimedia system design. He has presented and served as a panel expert at numerous networking, storage, & security conferences and is also a board member and technical consultant for several leading high-tech companies. In 2002, Ray received Red Herring’s Top 10 Innovators award.
Ray holds an MSEE degree from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a BSEE degree from National Chiao Tung University. He also conducted advanced research at MIT.
Keriyun (KJ) Liu, Vice President of Asia Pacific Sales, Co–Founder
Based in Taiwan and leading CipherMax's Asia–Pacific sales activities, KJ Liu is a twenty–year veteran of the high tech industry, both in the US and internationally. Before assuming his current role, Liu served as CipherMax’s Vice President of Finance and Administration.
Experienced in both technical and management roles, Liu served as Director of Productivity Management Services for Collett International, a Silicon Valley engineering management consulting firm.
Liu spent eleven years with Oki Semiconductor where he served as Senior ASIC Development Engineering Manager and was responsible for supervising both hardware and software development efforts. Prior to Oki, Liu held positions with Advanced Micro Device and National Semiconductor.
Liu holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Clemson University, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
John W. Jeng, Vice President, Operations and Support
John Jeng has more than 24 years of diverse experience in the high tech industry. At CipherMax, Jeng leads the manufacturing, global customer service, IT and facilities groups. Since joining CipherMax in June of 2001, he has developed the company’s manufacturing operations strategy, implementing the concepts of Design for Manufacturability and Testability and New Product Introduction Discipline, work that has enabled CipherMax to productize early-stage technology in the global marketplace quickly and cost effectively.
John joined CipherMax from Broadxent Inc., where he served as Vice President of Operations. He also held various executive and management positions with Asante Technologies, Diamond Multimedia, Eveready Industry, and Solectron Corp. In these positions, John established cost and manufacturing models that included new product introduction discipline, supply chain management, manufacturing & test engineering and quality assurance in multinational manufacturing operations.
John received his Master of Science degree in Systems Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
Yingwei Zhang, Vice President of Asia Pacific Marketing and Business Development
Yingwei has over 12 years of in-depth knowledge & experience in the business strategy and transformation, enterprise IT architecture design, solution planning, and sales & marketing.
Prior to CipherMax, Yingwei has served as IBM Storage Solution & Technical Leader for 8 years, where he provided enterprise-class storage solutions, open platform storage architecture and storage solution design. His focus includes business continuity, infrastructure simplification, information lifecycle management, and data encryption solution. He has made significant contribution in winning many major deals in communication, banking, and government sectors. Prior to IBM, Yingwei was the Engineering Director at Systex. Yingwei received his Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from North China University of Technology.
Steven Tan, Vice President of Engineering
Steven has over 15 years of product design & development experience in the storage networking industry. Prior to CipherMax, Steven was a senior member of the architecture team at Nishan Systems Inc. that pioneered the design of IP based storage area networking systems. He played a key role in the technology integration following the acquisition of Nishan by McDATA Corp. in 2003 (acquired by Brocade). Before Nishan, Steven held various principal engineering positions at Maxtor (acquired by Seagate), Micropolis, and Creative Technology. Steven holds a patent in the area of optical drive performance optimization.
Steven holds a joint B. Eng (Hons) E.E. degree awarded by the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.