ITWire

White said: "We did a trial in Europe for an operator that was particularly concerned about how to deal with their IN [intelligent network] services as they move to LTE and VoLTE. These IN services provide huge functionality to customers but porting them to next generation networks is a pain."

Another application, developed with UK-based systems integrator Anana, enables a telco's customers to have their most recent tweet converted to speech and played to callers to the tweeter's phone.

Another app, developed with US-based Aricent, expands the alerting options for its home security offering enabling the user to specify multiple contacts to be notified through video calls when a home intrusion or emergency is detected, and to use alternative means of contact such as SMS, e-mail or even social networks.

Alcatel-Lucent has set up a developer portal for the new APIs. http://developer-ims.alcatel-lucent.com/ White said: "We have created a portal that has made it really easy for developers to find all the information on the APIs and then, when they have created the app, they have access to an Alcatel-Lucent network on that they can prototype their application on. We also have a lot of apps we showcase in there that we have built over the last six months, and some testimonials."

Launch of the APIs, dubbed 'New Conversation APIs', is the latest phase in Alcatel-Lucent's three year focus on APIs that the company kicked off in 2009 when it announced its 'Open API Service' and 'Application Exposure Suite', billed as "a host of capabilities to help service providers open their networks to application developers and content providers in a secure and controlled way to speed the creation of innovative Web 2.0 services for consumers and enterprises."

Most recently, in August, the company launched a consulting and professional services practice centred on application enablement for telcos.