Wander has looked ahead and sums up his belief about preparing for the future this way: Travel with as little baggage as possible and be ready for rapid transitions, particularly in the mobile era.

The world he sees coming is saturated with mobile devices, ubiquitous computing, technologies that give rise to new competitors that meet all their IT needs through services, and employees who work outside the office and from any place.

Wander's response to these trends is to to two -- one that's owned by the company and one that is outsourced. It also means shifting to services, including for , whether internally delivered or through vendors, as well as eliminating platforms and deploying Linux on x86 systems "in a very large way."

"We have been working for the last few years to actually eliminate as much technology as we can," said Wander, in part to try to free up resources to invest in other areas.

Unix systems may be in the firing line in this transition, but Wander won't say for certain because the vendors may change the economics of Unix deployment. But the goal, said Wander, is clear: "We are going to unclutter the environment and lower the cost of delivering services."