Yahoo’s top mobile exec, Marco Boerries, is departing Yahoo, according to an internal email obtained by BoomTown that he sent to some staffers on Sunday.

I have also confirmed Boerries’s departure with company insiders familiar with the situation.

In a post Monday on a management restructuring at Yahoo (YHOO) that new CEO Carol Bartz is likely to unveil to the company this week–sources tell me it is now set to be announced internally tomorrow–I noted that Boerries was one of the more likely high-level execs to go.

He has been the EVP for the Connected Device Division at Yahoo for four years, coming to the company in 2005 with the acquisition of VerdiSoft. He also had earlier sold another software company to Sun Microsystems (JAVA) in 1999.

Nonetheless, many inside Yahoo expected him to go with the changing of leadership recently, after almost two years of turmoil at Yahoo. Like many, he reportedly wanted to leave earlier, but felt loyalty to former CEO Jerry Yang.

I wrote:

Boerries, a talented but more freewheeling exec under Yang, is another question all together. Already wealthy from selling several companies, the entrepreneurial exec is most often mentioned by sources as someone unlikely to stick around, especially if Bartz tries to rein him in more. (In addition, Boerries has family issues requiring that he spend a lot of time in his native Germany.)”

In his email, Boerries did not mention Bartz, but did indeed mention his personal issues.

“With a very heavy heart I have to tell you, that I will be leaving Yahoo!,” Boerries wrote, attributing his departure in an email titled “Personal Update,” to issues related to his family.

Because of that, Boerries has more recently been splitting his time between Northern California and Hamburg.

In the note to staff, he also noted all the successes Yahoo has had with its mobile and other device efforts.

It’s unclear what the impact of Boerries’s departure on Yahoo’s Connected Life unit will be.

But it seems more likely than not that Bartz will cut back, given that it is harder to monetize now and also because Yahoo does not have its own device, as both Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) do, which might help it create a more virtuous ecosystem.

Still, Yahoo has some extremely interesting products in the mobile space and, as is typical, really well done, such as many parts of its oneConnect service for smartphones.

In addition, Boerries unveiled a pretty interesting Connected TV effort at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, although this is also an area still struggling to find a lucrative business model.

Here’s a video of me interviewing Boerries, as well as Yang and outgoing President Sue Decker, about Connected TV:

And here is the Boerries goodbye memo in its entirety:

From: Marco Boerries
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2009 12:06:30 PM
Subject: Personal Update

Marco

BoomTown is thinking of starting a drinking game wherein the group gathered at Yahoo’s “Open House” media event this morning takes a shot of Cuervo every time an exec says “open.”

Except, everyone would be drunker than drunk by now if that was the case, as Yahoo lays out strategies to open its platform and all its products to the whole wide world.

That would be developers, publishers, advertisers, content creators and my mother.

OK, not her, since she cannot turn on a computer. But definitely everyone else.

As Yahoo U.S. VP Hilary Schneider noted, the main benefit for Yahoo (YHOO) ad clients of Yahoo becoming more open and allowing them to buy and target ads more easily: “It’s more access, better [return on investment], and it gives the advertiser a better experience.”

It’s also easier. “What an advertiser wants to do is reach target consumers, and they want to do it without working with a lot of different silos,” she said.

While Schneider (pictured here) was not specific in any substantive way–more to come next month, apparently–about what that ad system eventually looks like, streamlining and automating Yahoo’s often confusing ad process is critical to improved financial results.

She also skittered rather quickly through any specifics about the company’s controversial Google (GOOG) deal, in which Yahoo is outsourcing some of its search-ad business, making it sound peachy-keen for advertisers and not scary in any way.

Next up was Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries, who had not been expected to present, to talk about Yahoo’s mobile strategy.

“Open for us in mobile is not only a strategy, but a necessity,” said Boerries (pictured here), who also showed off a more open mobile home page that users could customize in any way.

He also talked about more openness for Yahoo’s Blueprint mobile development platform, which lets third-party developers create standalone applications, as well as its oneConnect, which debuted yesterday.

Yahoo has described the service as an “evolutionary new social address book that brings together a user’s circle of friends, their lives and all the ways they communicate into one seamless, easy-to-use application.”

Essentially, it is a social-networking aggregation play, which is a good thing to do given that Yahoo does not have a true social-networking play.

Next up: Video of demos!