 It's theCUBE, here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Crick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center at Node Summit 2015. We haven't been here for a few years. We want to come back, get an update, obviously. Cloud and mobile and social has really changed since 2012, our last visit, so we're excited to be here. We're really excited to have our next guest on Rachel Chalmers, a principal at Ignition Partners. Welcome. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. So you've covered the enterprise space for a long time. You're a 451 for years and years and years. How is that evolving now as we see this consumerization of IT kind of start swelling into the enterprise? I would say that it's evolving awesomely. Enterprise IT is, I consider it a precious natural resource. We've spent 40 years training enterprises to pay millions of dollars for technology and so we must conserve that for future generations. But one of the exciting things that's happening right now is that enterprises are employing more and more young people who have very different expectations for what an app looks like, what presence looks like, what remote working looks like. And this is creating incredible new opportunities for application developers to create new environments for the next generation of workers. Some of them will be human and some of them will be devices, IoT devices and sensors out in the field. And those devices and people will work together to do things that we can't even do today. Yeah, it's interesting. Facebook, Amazon, Google, those guys really defined a better class of application experience. Used to be the enterprises had the best apps, now suddenly the consumers have it. And then like you said, the young people that go to work, you know, their expectations of what they should be able to do are very, very different. Right, and this is an incredibly exciting opportunity for Enterprise IT, which has been dealing with these legacy systems for so long. What's happened is a new generation of tools that have come along, which allow enterprises to wrap and to create new interfaces and to create new abstraction layers to build new kinds of user experience which make their work as much more productive. I believe the really great technologies are the ones that turn people into 10x, 100x engineers by creating a community and an environment and a visual paradigm in which they can just be enormously productive. Now you're looking at it now from a VC perspective, right? So you're looking at kind of a whole ecosystem of investment opportunities. So how do you kind of organize that ecosystem? There's the containers, there's the open source pieces, there's a lot of pieces in this ecosystem. How do you kind of organize your world? Well, that idea of employee productivity is probably the major organizing principle around my investment theses. I love investments like Splunk, which was an ignition company that a CIS admin could take and within an hour become proficient in and be able to solve problems that he or she couldn't solve before. So I'm looking for those kinds of tools. My boss, Nick Sturiali, talks about moments to joy, the time between when you take a piece of software down from the web and start playing with it and when it makes you smile and feel like you're doing things that you couldn't do before. So we don't really divide up the landscape by technologies. We divide it up by problems that need to be solved by questions that are still outstanding and approaches that promise fruitful new avenues to explore. And that's how we got involved in the Hadoop ecosystem early on. And that in a nutshell is why we're all over the API economy right now. That's great. We do the Splunk.com show and it's one of our favorites because they do have such a very passionate user base, fan base, if you will. Them, ServiceNow, it's a different type of application. ServiceNow, they send a cake. They have a birthday cake when they finish a deployment. I don't think anyone ever finished a birthday cake or made a birthday cake after some of these old ERP implementations. So that's pretty exciting. Cathy Sierra, who's a hero of mine, wrote a book called Creating Passionate Users. And I'm all about technologies which make users happy, which make them better at their jobs. I think that's what we need in order to solve the really big problems that we're facing as a society. Right, and I like your point of view too. It's not necessarily about the delivery of the value to the end customer, but to the internal folks, the internal developers, the internal team. And I think my kind of wake up moment was going to ask my son to send somebody an email, which he doesn't ever want to do. He's 19 years old. But then two, he just did it on his phone. I'm like, don't you sit down at your laptop and do any of them? No, no, no, Dad, it's already done. Yeah, the workplace is changing. The kinds of work that we do are changing. The way we define value is changing. You know, a knowledge economy is going to consume different kinds of resources and going to have a different impact on the environment than any of the economies we've seen coming so far. And I think we're in the prehistory of that. And that's what makes me so excited to get up and go to work in the morning. That's great, yeah, cause the internet of things, right? Is the next giant wave that's coming that's coming right behind us. Everything, everything. Yeah, it's funny we were at the forward grand opening of their research and development center in Silicon Valley, ironically, just down the street from Tesla. And they were talking about all kind of the easy to identify things, self-driving cars, autonomous parking, this and that. But God, the stuff that's under the hood, the opportunities there are phenomenal. Yeah, it's incredibly exciting to be in the place that all of the Fortune 1000 companies send their little forward-looking teams to do that knowledge transfer. I work with groups from Bechtel, from the federal government, from all kinds of very large organizations who are coming to Silicon Valley to learn about what we've built here with Web 2.0 and to take that knowledge back to the rest of the world. And it's just, it's really, really rewarding to work with those groups. So give us a little bit of, you guys are always forward-thinking, right? Smart analysts, VCs. What are some of the things that are maybe just a little bit over the horizon that a lot of people aren't aware of that you're starting to see some pictures come in, some new developments on this horizon? That is a great question. I would say I'm particularly excited about the blockchain technologies at the moment. We hear about blockchain overwhelmingly in terms of Bitcoin, but what blockchain does is it makes possible a general ledger without a hierarchical authority to give its imprimatur to that transaction. And so really it's the second coming to peer-to-peer technologies, but with a really robust trust model. I think the implications of blockchain go far beyond currency, into insurance, into legal transactions, into automated transactions on the network. So I'm very excited about some of the infrastructural work that's going on there. I loved Andreessen's piece on the BGP, right? It was the first time I ever kind of understood Bitcoin, not in the context of a currency, but as a computer science math problem. And it's pretty exciting stuff. It really, really is. Well, Rachel, I know we're short on time. Thanks for stopping by, I really appreciate it. And so I'm Jeff Frick, we're on the ground here with Rachel Chalmers at the Node Summit 2015 in San Francisco, California. Thanks for watching.