Accelerating its move toward an open third-party application development strategy, Alcatel-Lucent said it has acquired ProgrammableWeb, one of the largest directories of application programming interfaces (APIs). The purchase, terms of which were not disclosed, gives Alcatel-Lucent a significant new window to the developer community and a repository of more than 2000 APIs from startups, large enterprises, and telecom carriers.
ProgrammableWeb marks the next step in what AlcaLu calls its “Application Enablement Strategy” – essentially a counter-attack designed to siphon off some of the resources and developer innovation that have flowed to mobile devices, particularly the iPhone, in the last two years. In December 2009 the vendor launched this strategy with its API Exposure Suite (which gives telcos and other businesses tools for opening up and benefiting from their API portfolios) and its Open API Service. Those were followed in February by the Developer Platform, which provides a layer on top of the Exposure Suite to provide more developer tools such as analytics engines, a sandbox for testing apps, and so on.
ProgrammableWeb completes the set, said Alcatel-Lucent vice president of developer platforms Laura Merling. “It’s an ecosystem that combines a director of all available open APIs with a community of developers who use those and want to learn more about them.” AlcaLu, in turn, will share its developer resources, including a Web dashboard that allows developers track downloads and sales.
The result, Merling added, will be an innovation engine that brings third-party developers, API, and carriers together to “make the network the platform for development.”
Founded in 2005, ProgrammableWeb offers what it calls the Internet's largest searchable database of APIs and mashups, enabling developers to quickly find tools and resources from a variety of businesses.
