Alcatel-Lucent is gearing up for a busy week at this year’s GSMA Mobile World Congress, with announcements planned surrounding its recent move into software, a femtocell launch, updates on its work in the embedded mobile market and a meeting for members of its Green Touch initiative.

In an interview with Show Daily, Kenneth Frank, president of the vendor’s solutions and marketing division, said the company will be “announcing some new capabilities in support of our Application Enablement vision, which leverages the best of the Web and telecom worlds by securely exposing select network resources to application developers and content partners so they can build new ‘service mash-ups.’” 

In particular, added Frank, the vendor will be introducing both a new development platform for developers and service providers alike, along with a program for developers to facilitate the creation of Web-telecom mash-ups.

Meanwhile, visitors should keep an eye out for “a new offering in the femtocell/small cell space” as well as demonstrations of its progress in the embedded mobile sector. “We’re showing many of these more advanced applications here at MWC, including the LTE Connected Car from the ng Connect program, which Alcatel-Lucent founded – a virtual smartphone on wheels that’s prominently featured on Alcatel-Lucent’s stand.” 

Elsewhere, Frank said that the founding members of the Green Touch initiative will be meeting in Barcelona this week “to continue laying the foundations and establishing the framework to fundamentally revolutionise ICT.” Established at the end of last year by Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent’s research arm, Green Touch is a global initiative aimed at identifying technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today.

Finally, the vendor aims to tout its continued progress in LTE. Fresh off the back of its win last week at US operator AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent’s Frank sees the US and Japanese markets as driving the move to LTE initially (due to spectrum availability, intense operator competition and availability of multiple technologies). “Europe and China are following closely with tier one operators engaged in trials and commercial services anticipated in 2011-2012,” he stated. “We expect some less-developed markets to ramp up a bit more slowly, but will comprise 30% of the LTE market by 2015.”