The massive shifts under way within the corporate enterprise from individual servers to virtualized ones, and from doing everything in-house to outsourcing into cloud-based models, has turned the CIO‘s job upside down.

So what do CIOs need to keep in mind? According to Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer for EMC‘s information infrastructure products, there are three main points to remember:

1. Drive the new policy for how to develop applications of the future. That may be partly in-house or completely outsourced--but it almost certainly will be more standardized.

2. Become the business process partner internally for your line of businesses. It all comes down to how you create new value, new services and new applications.

3. You have to manage across the heterogeneous environment of the past to this new environment. There are a lot of legacy applications and mainframes, including applications written in COBOL.

"The son of the guy who wrote that code is now retiring," says Gelsinger. "You have to figure out how to containerize, encapsulate and rewrite code. The role of the CIO carries these very distinct requirements."

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