Having just acquired in June the application interface element of its new ecosystem with its ProgrammableWeb buy, Alcatel-Lucent added a developer’s dream with the acquisition today of cross-platform mobile development tool provider Open Plug.
Alcatel-Lucent says it aims to help service providers level the playing field with Apple and Google when it comes to application enablement.
OpenPlug is a mobile software and applications development tools vendor that allows service providers, enterprises and developers to create applications that can be deployed across multiple mobile devices and within service provider app stores. Developers can write an application once and extend it to run on any of the five major mobile operating systems: iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux.
Laura Merling, vice president of developer platform and programs at Alcatel-Lucent, said her company has been busy the last nine to 12 months making all the parts in the ecosystem work together and reverse the fragmentation that has arisen in the market and limited the ability of applications to work cross-platform.
“The reality is you have to make apps work across platforms and help service providers ensure they are part of the ecosystem,” Merling said.
Typically, developers want to reach the broadest market possible, so he or she would have to pick the largest platform, such as Symbian, and build to that. “But Open Plug lets you write once using a single development tool and then compile it to each native operating system,” Merling said. “If they can code in a single language and then compile it to specific devices, it really opens the opportunity for them to reach a broader audience.”
With Open Plug tools, applications that had previously only been available on more sophisticated devices such as smartphones, can now be written to any mobile device. This is particularly attractive in emerging markets because it basically turns any device into a smart device.
Merling said OpenPlug software can help service providers reduce time to market by as much as 80 percent by allowing them to easily port an application to all of their devices. The company’s products include ELIPS Suite, a white-label application suite that facilitates the design of mass-market mobile phones, and ELIPS Studio technologies, an open software development environment allowing independent software vendors to create and deploy simultaneously on all platforms.
Alcatel-Lucent will sell Open Plug tools directly to developers through its ProgrammableWeb and Open API service as well as bundled as part of its developer platform or directly to service providers within their own developer programs.
