Seeking to expand its web development portfolio for wireless operators, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) today announced its acquisition of OpenPlug, a French-based mobile applications development tools vendor. The move is notable in that traditional infrastructure suppliers increasingly are offering applications solutions to operators as data consumption grows and voice revenues decline.
The purchase of OpenPlug is part of the company’s broader application enablement strategy, which helps wireless operators leverage the network so operators can remain relevant to end users. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed. This is ALU’s second software-related acquisition this year. The company bought ProgrammableWeb, an API company, in June.
“Through this acquisition, Alcatel-Lucent deepens its role in the applications space by delivering,
as part of its integrated suite of developer tools, a platform where application developers can
write an application once, which will then be translated to run on any of the five major mobile
operating systems,” the company said in a prepared statement.
The OpenPlug tools should entice apps developers to write for operators because their apps can be written once and run on five operating systems – iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux.
“Being able to provide more applications across multiple devices helps service providers
significantly broaden their app store content to create more value for consumers,” said Laura
Merling, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent’s global developer strategy. “As service providers
typically offer multiple mobile devices to their subscriber base, the OpenPlug software can help
them get to market five times faster by allowing them to easily port an application to all of their
devices. And this isn’t purely a mobile play — the software can be extended to support
application development for IPTV set top boxes, game consoles, even the ng Connect LTE
Connected Car.”
OpenPlug solutions will be incorporated into ALU’s Developer Platform and Open API service.
