French communications giant Alcatel-Lucent has announced the acquisition of OpenPlug, which makes tools for mobile application developers.
It means that Alcatel-Lucent can offer OpenPlug’s functionality to service providers, enterprises and developers so they can create and deploy applications across multiple mobile devices – including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux – and within multiple app stores.
This is the second app-based acquisition Alcatel-Lucent has made over the past three months. In June, the company acquired ProgrammableWeb, a resource for API and 'mashup' content. The OpenPlug toolset will be incorporated into Alcatel-Lucent’s Developer Platform and Open API Service.
Eric Baissus, CEO of OpenPlug, said "Deploying valuable web and mobile services requires assembling many different pieces from many horizons. By combining OpenPlug’s ELIPS Suite and ELIPS Studio technologies with Alcatel-Lucent’s platforms and API services, we enable developers and service providers to gather all these pieces in a very efficient and consistent way. This will dramatically facilitate the deployment and the monetization of the new generation of applications that the market is expecting."