Alcatel-Lucent has moved into the high-profile applications space in an effort to curry favour with operators worldwide examining this new business opportunity. The vendor – best known for its telecom infrastructure hardware – yesterday unveiled its Application Exposure Suite (AES) and Open API Service. Light Reading Europe notes that the AES aims to enable operators to better support software developers by providing a set of building blocks – APIs, customisation capabilities, provisioning and apps monitoring capabilities – to the developers. Meanwhile the Open API Service is a hosted cloud service which the vendor says “brings developers and service providers together to support the rapid creation and secure testing of new services.”

Alcatel-Lucent’s efforts in this space form part of the company’s planned restructuring under CEO Ben Verwaayen after years of losses. Verwaayen intends for the company to focus on the convergence of telecom and Internet capabilities and move into new areas aside from its network kit expertise.