With all the larger acquisitions that have taken place in France within the last year – like Exalead, PriceMinister or DailyMotion – it’s easy to almost forget that Alcatel-Lucent bought Sophia-Antipolis-based OpenPlug in September. It was the company’s 2nd acquisition in 3 months.
Well my dear mobile app developer friends, Alcatel-Lucent has now released a free version of OpenPlug’s development platform. This initiative aims primarily to resolve challanges presented by fragmentation by allowing developers to have free access to the “app translation” platform; OpenPlug’s development tools allow developers to create an application once and deploy it on the 5 main mobile operating systems: Symbian, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Linux. This naturally cuts down the work involved in making multi-platform and multi-OS applications.
This new free offer was initially priced at €199/year and is obviously part of Alcatel-Lucent’s strategy to build itself in the mobile apps space. Still, the company has not removed the price tags for all of the OpenPlug solutions – which are priced between €79 and €4990 per year. Nonetheless, I’m sure the mobile apps developer community will still thank Alcatel-Lucent for this free offer.