Yankee Group analysts Zeus Kerravala and Gene Signorini served up some tough talk to Silicon Valley last month in an Anywhere Tour presentation on enterprise mobility. They pointed out to the assembled vendors that what users want on their mobile devices is not their original application, squeezed to fit, but their data. Whatever gets them that data in the simplest, easiest way, will carry the day: not some ‘mini-me’ version of Siebel’s CRM, for example.

Zeus and I had a fascinating conversation recently with Pradeep Sindhu, founder, vice-chairman, and chief technology officer at Juniper Networks. Here’s an excerpt that relates directly to Zeus’ and Gene’s point:

Pradeep: There’s a lesson I have seen time and again in high-tech: the victory of technology that’s just ‘good enough’. In many situations where technologically superior solutions became available, the market rejected them and continued with something that was only good enough.

Emily: Like the QWERTY keyboard? And FORTRAN, Ethernet, and even TCP/IP… Once those things get established, it’s next to impossible to unseat them with something new. I would never have expected Ethernet to enjoy such a long life, given the technical superiority of some alternatives that emerged.

Pradeep: And like the x86 instruction set — it’s pretty much the standard now. Doesn’t mean that we couldn’t do a better job of it if we started over, but we won’t. RIM has proven this most recently; their corporate mobile email solution is good enough, and thus I predict it will be very hard to replace.

Emily: You’re right. We should name this phenomenon. “Pradeep’s Law,” perhaps.

Pradeep: No, no; laws are universal. This is something that could be locally violated.

Emily: OK, so we’ll call it “Pradeep’s Principle” instead.

Watch our CEO Corner for the full-length interview with Pradeep, in which he talks about the implications on the corporate data center of the world’s move to ubiquitous connectivity.