Alcatel-Lucent pushes app tools, vision

In the early days of applying Web 2.0 principles to telecom, former IT vendors ruled the agenda. But traditional network equipment manufacturers have been steadily embracing more open application server platforms to again lay stake to being at the center of telco service creation.

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) this morning put its most aggressive stake in the ground yet on this front, delivering new Application Exposure Suite capabilities and tools to help service providers expose core network capabilities to developers – both in-house and out in the wild.

Also new from Alcatel, with significant potential to open up new telco service paradigms: a cloud-based offering dubbed Open API Service that allows the vendor, and its service provider customers, to deliver crucial services – such as location awareness – to developers as simple cloud APIs that can be accessed on a pay-as-you-go, transaction basis. If that approach takes hold, it could be the last step to move telco service creation fully into the more open API- and cloud-based world of Google and Amazon Web service development.

Alcatel-Lucent formally introduced the new capabilities in a press conference today in Paris.

“There are obviously other enablement platforms out there,” said Kenneth Frank, Alcatel-Lucent’s president of solutions marketing, in an interview. He pointed to device manufacturers like Apple and Google Android, over-the-top providers and traditional SDP vendors as examples. “But all of them are built around their core assets; in the case of device makers, that’s assets embedded within the handset like GPS,” he said. “Our fundamental premise is that the network has a richness of assets that is as valuable, if not more, and that allows developers and service providers to differentiate their applications.”

At the core of the announcement is its Application Enablement Suite, which helps service providers expose key service information including subscriber location, service preferences, connection guarantees, billing relationships and more, via service enablers that sit deep in the carrier network. While IT vendors like IBM, Oracle and HP have been pitching so-called service delivery platforms (SDPs) to accomplish much the same goals, Alcatel-Lucent is hoping it can leverage its role deep in many carrier networks to make such service exposures more seamless and network-aware.

“If you think about service enablers, in the context we describe them, they become part of the true services flow of the network. They have access to the underlying network – in real-time – that is much different than just operating at the application layer,” Alcatel-Lucent’s Frank said. “As we implement this, it becomes part of the network infrastructure.”

The new application suite grew out of custom services work done with a number of Alcatel-Lucent’s largest operator customers – in many ways representing a “productization” of that work that can be more easily and repeatedly be deployed by other carriers worldwide.

The Open API Service (accessible http://developer.openapiservice.com) in many ways looks like other developer portals – the difference being the relative size and influence of Alcatel-Lucent versus early telco app upstarts as well as its ability to help aggregate access to a number of global telco APIs via a single cloud access point. In addition to hosting provider APIs, the service will help carriers register, provision and support developers accessing those interfaces.

Alcatel-Lucent said it is already providing a number of developers access to APIs via the cloud service, including 1020 Placecast, 3Cinteractive, Agent511 and Gamma Engineers.

“One of the tenants of the Open API Service is the aggregation of carrier APIs to help attract the developer community,” Frank said, emphasizing however that Alcatel-Lucent will not play a middleman or broker role but rather an enablement role in that application ecosystem. “We’ll push consistency and normalization, a common approach to exposing APIs.”

Supporting the application suite and API service, Alcatel-Lucent will continue to grow its services business, offering so-called “transformation services” to help providers integrate these new capabilities into their networks and jump start the service creation process.

Alcatel-Lucent said it wasn’t ready to announce service provider customers for its app suite yet, but it did point to Singapore-based Nucleus Connect as an example of a carrier taking advantage of its transformation services offering. Nucleus is working with Alcatel-Lucent for build-operate-transfer BSS/OSS solutions which in turn have been used to create a virtual application mall and partner business-to-business gateway.

Such service creation-focused services fall in line with Alcatel-Lucent’s growing network operations outsourcing business, which has developed the capabilities to help run core telco operations around the globe.

In sum, the service creation capabilities support carrier moves to become much more than a dumb pipe provider, Frank said. “Service providers need to share in the revenue; they are a value provider, not a utility. They need to play a stronger part in the value chain,” he said. “Traffic and the cost of supporting that traffic is outpacing the ARPU increases they are getting from their end users. To unleash the next stage of innovation, that model is going to have to change.”