Rob Gingell, Sun's chief engineer and a 20-year Sun veteran, has left Sun to become executive vice president and chief technology officer of Cassatt Corporation - based like Sun in Santa Clara and headed up by BEA Systems co-founder Bill Coleman, the 'B' in BEA.

Formed in September 2003 and focused on grid computing and SOA (service-oriented architecture) technologies, Cassatt is the same company that Sun's former VP of developer software, Rich Green, joined - also as an EVP - when he left left Sun last April.

The links between Gingell and Coleman go back even further. Coleman was once head of Sun's professional services and development.

At Sun, Gingell created dynamic linking mechanisms now prevalent in UNIX implementations, worked on the ELF object file format, and led operating systems development in the areas of memory management and multithreading.

"These efforts led to efforts in the definition and deployment of Application Binary Interface (ABI) technologies that include the current technology underlying Sun's Solaris application guarantee programs," according to information available at sun.com.

More recently he had a variety of roles in system software, was Chief Technologist for Sun's systems software portfolio, including Solaris, Java, Jini, developer tools, and the StarOffice products and related technologies. As if that were not enough, he also headed up the JCP for Sun.