The IT Soothsayers

More so than other types of investing, venture capital requires its practitioners to be skilled in the art of fortune telling. At least if they want to stick around for a while. To be successful venture capitalists have to be good at envisioning the future of technology -- and then do everything they can to make their vision pan out. IT Best Of Breed sat down with partners from some of the top venture capital firms, all of which focus on the enterprise IT space. And importantly, everyone we spoke with saw massive opportunities for the channel in the years ahead.

But there'll be some changes, too, amid the continued acceleration of the cloud and the software-defined data center, along with the rise of developers as key IT decision-makers within their companies (among other trends). The VCs also offered insights about which companies in their portfolios have been most successful with the channel and what sort of advice they're offering about working with partners in the current environment.

Here's what a half-dozen top VCs -- five from San Francisco and Silicon Valley and one from Boston -- have been saying about the channel.