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.

Our Anywhere Tour event in Los Angeles took place yesterday at the tony W Hotel in Westwood, also the site the same evening of an HBO party. Looking down from my room onto the garden area HBO was using, Lindsay Lohan and her alcohol-monitoring anklet were nowhere to be seen. But I did notice an only-in-LA (or maybe Vegas) sight: an elaborate ring of fire set up in the hotel pool, shooting flames several feet in the air.

How appropriate. Boyd Peterson, Linda Barrabee, Mike Goodman and I had been meeting with movie studios and TV networks this week, talking about their challenges in the collision of their businesses with the burgeoning appetite of network providers to provide entertainment. Most of the conversations touched on the North American walled garden for mobile content: the barrier the wireless providers hope to maintain to protect their centrality in the provision of services to the Anywhere Consumer.

History’s destined to repeat itself, I believe: It all reminded me of the arguments I had in 1996 with AOL’s Steve Case and Ted Leonsis. While they continued to add subscribers to AOL’s walled garden at a rate far outstripping the admittedly incorrect predictions I was making for their subscriber base growth, they also convinced themselves that subscribers would stay with their protected, controlled environment in the face of exponentially increasing options outside those walls. Ultimately, of course, the open network won the war.

How long before ‘the deck breaks’, as Google’s wireless strategist Rich Miner says? I think the answer lies in the speed with which the off-deck content offerings, paired with the ability of handheld devices to share them, get better than they are today. We’re looking hard at the question — send me your thoughts on the obstacles and the catalysts for dousing the ring of fire.

I joined some Boston technology colleagues and a few West Coast interlopers for Red Herring East this week. The formal agenda is here, but the informal discussion was this: Is technology innovation on North America’s eastern coast different?

Admittedly there are a few problems right off the bat with this question. First, different than what? The implied contrast of course is that center of the tech universe known as Silicon Valley. “East coast” is the next issue: As any chowder-eater knows, Boston is one thing and Manhattan another. Pity the speakers from Canada and Raleigh-Durham who had the job of reminding the rest of us that there are also vibrant entrepreneurial communities north and south of the Amtrak corridor.

Setting aside niggling details like those, however, we gamely entered the fray. Paul Sagan of Akamai claimed, in an ironic twist on the Getrude Stein remark about Oakland, that there’s no ‘here’ here – not enough of an after-work social fabric to engage young tech venture workers. [However, as an ardent fan of MITX, I can tell you that there are lots of events in this area to draw tech folks together. Perhaps they just like the Red Sox better.]

I offered that if American innovators are the descendants in many cases of European immigrants – those who chose to get on the boats and go to an unknown new world – then Western entrepreneurs are frequently offspring of those who were then venturesome enough to jump into a covered wagon to check out the other side of the Rockies. Maybe that makes our California cousins even bigger risk-takers.

The point at which I got startled out of my own tired assumptions about innovators in North America was when an audience member suggested that there’s a funding gap in some regional markets. The most thoughtful response to this came from a VC panelist added to the roster too late for me to note his name. He said there’s no funding gap, as there should in fact always be more companies seeking funding than the number that win it. “That should be the case, otherwise we’re saying that every company that wants capital deserves it, and we know that’s not true. The gap we have in the East and may eventually have elsewhere is a founding gap. When we let future entrepreneurs come to the US to complete advanced degrees at MIT, but then deny them legal residency afterwards, they found their businesses elsewhere. That’s the biggest innovation problem we face here today.”

The problem with East coast innovation, whatever that is, is that it hasn’t gotten worse than California – it’s that many other places have gotten a lot better.

Dateline: Madrid

Yankee Group’s focus on disruptive connectivity technologies has led us to regular research on WiMAX, the so-called fourth-generation of mobile network architectures. The WiMAX Forum is a non-profit association formed to complete the standard, assure interoperability, and hammer out other market issues to support its adoption. Today I’m snacking on tapas in Madrid at one of the Forum’s quarterly week-long meetings around the world to get a sense of the state of play.

I worked on a communications standards body 20 years ago. It hasn’t changed much: the same geeky, acronym-rich environment bogged down a bit by the democratic process, but powered by the shared passion to create something useful. It might not mean an end to world hunger in our time, but getting mobile broadband to emerging countries is a very worthy endeavor in my book. Communication means economic and political empowerment.

It’s not going to be easy, though. The challenges are less with the technology which can be bent to do pretty much whatever we want and more about the business models in place today and the potential threat from truly seamless broadband. I was fascinated by one discussion between two teams, one charged with designing global roaming support, and the other conceiving the future applications of the architecture. When a network provider in one region has licensed content for subscribers who roam into another network with a competing arrangement, or none at all, is the content blocked? Who pays who and how much?

Content owners must think globally about distribution deals now; political boundaries will be almost impossible to maintain in the Anywhere Network.

Dateline: London

Yankee Group VP Camille Mendler’s excellent Anywhere Tour presentation on Generation Me and the consumerization of technology in the enterprise just concluded; she’d talked about the maturation of a self-possessed young workforce accustomed to getting what it wants and very much at ease with rev after rev of consumer electronics products.

We had launched into lively Q&A incited by her remarks when one baby boomer spoke up. “Isn’t this a repeat? Isn’t this like the way the PC came into the corporation from the edge followed by the local-area network? The last two major innovations in technology have both been forced on to the central IT organization against its will. How’s this different?”

Too true.

Corporate IT will once again be fighting the impression in the organization that they’re on the job to stop things they can’t control. The difference is that this battle is unfolding even faster than the last two, and on many more fronts inside the company. And the risks are bigger, given that every MP3 device is just an unauthorized hard drive. IT has to respond quickly and more nimbly.

Camille’s presentation drew from an upcoming Yankee Group report (clients: look for Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management shortly) on the pressures building on traditional IT teams from employees expecting to be able to use all their personal electronic toys at work and impatient with the imposition of limitations on support. I like the report’s ideas about how IT can best cope with the onslaught. How is your firm’s IT team coping with the explosion of smart phones, MP3 devices, cheap storage sticks, third-party e-mail retrieval, and all the other unapproved tools we depend on each day?

Dateline: Toronto

The day before our Anywhere Tour reached Toronto to talk about the impact of convergence and competition on connectivity in Canada (lots of Cs there), the local news was all about Bell Canada (BCE) being on the block and the pursuit to acquire it being joined by yet another private equity firm, Onex. On a cable TV financial show, I talked a bit about the implications. In the global connectivity revolution, traditional regional incumbent network operators face declining fixed line revenues and the emerging appetites of a new kind of consumer, emboldened by new connectivity freedom but just as reluctant to spend for media as always. What BCE really needs is more scale which could come from a merger with another Canadian operator, such as Telus and relentlessly creative consumer marketing to pick up their mobile revenue.

The same day, I met with Virgin Mobile Canada CEO Andrew Black and his leadership team, who are building a Canadian Virgin brand on top of a white-label mobile network. They bring deep experience from the brand world and an intense focus on making their retail strategy work for the Canadian consumer.

Revolutions change the power structure. Will the Anywhere Network be led by firms that understand the consumer better than the network itself?

In Manhattan for our Anywhere Tour, I’m lunching in Midtown with an early leader in mobile marketing, ipsh! founder and CEO Nihal Mehta. What’s on his mind? A mix of gratitude and anxiety.The gratitude comes from the steep change over the last few months in the volume of interest in mobile marketing, both from brands and from North American consumers, which Nihal attributes wryly to “American Idol.”

“Six months ago, mobile strategies were an afterthought with the big brands and their agencies. They treated it like they were trying to squeeze in dessert after a big meal. ‘Oh, we only have $50K left? Let’s just order a cupcake.’ Trivial stuff. But now that Ryan Seacrest has taught everyone’s grandmother how to text, we’re suddenly at the marketing table at the same time with other media. That makes a big difference in the type of multimedia campaign we’re able to design, which makes our campaigns more effective.”

At the same time, Nihal fears irrational exuberance will spoil the mobile marketing party. His anxiety stems from the amount of VC capital surging into anything “M,” recently awarding big chunks of cash to, for example, 80108 Media for mobile content from a social network.

That’s one more mobile exec worried about a mubble—a mobile bubble—and the implied crash of expectations and opportunities afterward. My take: Investors will always cluster around a few interesting ideas. Apologies to my VC friends, but as a group you demonstrate just as much of a herd mentality as individual investors do in the public marketplace. And the inevitable truth that follows is that there will be casualties from that excess, as well as some individuals who get lucky all out of proportion to their real contribution.

But 3G networks with reasonable data plans are engaging consumers around the world in mobile internet activities, and we are just beginning to figure out how to make that experience useful and commercially viable. The Anywhere train has left the station—no mubble ahead!

On to the next stop!