Alcatel-Lucent is moving into the high-profile applications space, acting as a mediator between operators and the independent developer community. The vendor – one of the world’s largest mobile network equipment manufacturers – will unveil its plans on December 3 at the company’s headquarters in Paris, intending to “announce new offerings for service providers and developers in support of its Application Enablement vision.” Application Enablement, says Alcatel-Lucent, “is a new business and network model that enables the combination of the trusted capabilities of service providers with the speed and innovation of the Web to enable a new generation of services and provide both consumers and business users with richer experiences.”

With various major handset vendors and software companies already rolling out application stores, this area of the mobile industry is becoming increasingly disparate. Only last week the GSMA, together with Japanese operator SoftBank and Asia’s SingTel, called on the industry to back a more unified applications environment. For Alcatel-Lucent, its 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. According to a Light Reading Europe report, the vendor has already signed up Sprint Nextel to the service.