Infrastructure vendor Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday announced the acquisition of mobile application tools developer OpenPlug, giving it a strong presence in the developer space.

Through the acquisition, Alcatel-Lucent will get its hands on OpenPlug’s ELIPS Studio – an open software development environment allowing Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to create and deploy applications simultaneously on the iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Linux and other proprietary operating systems.

The vendor will now be able to extend this functionality to service providers, enterprises and developers so they can create and deploy applications across multiple mobile devices and within service provider app stores. Alcatel-Lucent believes this means applications that had previously only been available on smartphones can now be deployed to lower tier devices, opening up opportunities in emerging markets.

While demand for mobile apps is growing, the firm believes that so is the fragmentation of mobile development platforms and tools and this purchase is set to address that.

The move follows Alcatel-Lucent’s June acquisition of ProgrammableWeb – a source of API-related content.

“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 reduce time to market by as much as 80 per cent 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.”