Does SaaS Change the Role of the CIO?

SaaS or not, the CIO remains responsible for enabling the organization to run its processes efficiently, delivering the right information to the right people in the right time and providing a collaboration infrastructure. With that comes some necessary evils like networking, security, data centers, etc..
If some of those evils go away because SaaS will shield us from them, the CIO role remains unchanged.

Yes it does change the role of the CIO positively, it takes away the pain of managing a big part of the infrastructure.
Of course some CIO get their power from the weight of the iron boxes they own and operate but those are the older style CIO.
Love SaaS and love what it does to the role of the CIO. Hope we see more and more SaaS players and hope IBM starts a SaaS business to host SAP, Oracle and Microsoft products soon!