BEA's Adam Bosworth Departing For Google

The departure of BEA's chief architect, whose last day at the San Jose, Calif.-based company is Friday, comes as a bit surprise, given highly visible role at the vendor's annual eWorld show just two months ago in San Francisco. In his keynote at eWorld, he launched Project Alchemy, a plan to build a next-generation mobile browser.

This interest in creating browser technology might be a reason the well-respected Bosworth is joining Google. A Google spokesman would say only that Bosworth is joining in a "senior" engineering position. Bosworth could not be reached for comment Friday.

The BEA spokeswoman also would not comment on whether BEA will replace Bosworth, but said Alchemy will remain a key part of BEA's Liquid Computing strategy to provide software to build service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Bosworth joined BEA in 2001 when BEA bought CrossGain, a company he co-founded.

Prior to that, Bosworth spent many years at Microsoft, where he is best known for his pioneering work in XML, which resulted in the mark-up language's use as the key standard that enables Web services.

Bosworth also gained notoriety for being involved in a very controversial lawsuit with Microsoft after CrossGain was formed. Microsoft sued CrossGain and accused Bosworth and several other employees of breaking non-compete clauses they'd signed as Microsoft employees, a move that forced them to resign until their non-compete clauses expired. Bosworth later rejoined the company as CrossGain CEO.

The BEA spokeswoman would not speculate on whether other executives who joined BEA with the CrossGain acquisition, including BEA Chief Marketing Officer Tod Nielsen, might follow Bosworth's lead and also exit the company. At this time, she said no one else has resigned BEA.