Global networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent is best known to me (and many others) as a hardware vendor for communications and networking equipment.
Networks however are really just a means to an end though aren’t they? That’s a fact that Alcatel-Lucent realizes and they’ve now acquired the ProgrammableWeb.com site to help them expand their software vision.
On a personal level, I’ve been a fan (and user) of ProgrammableWeb for years. It is a showcase of web mashups and provides insight into how others are leveraging APIs from different sources to create new types of sites and services.
The plan for Alcatel-Lucent is to leverage the information and resources of ProgrammableWeb to help build more mind share with developers as well as being a knowledge base and a resource.
“If you look at any organization that launches an API, you quickly
realize
that the one thing the most successful APIs have in common is a vibrant
developer ecosystem,” said Laura Merling, vice president of
Alcatel-Lucent’s
global developer strategy in a statement. “Our goal is to protect the uniqueness and
independence of ProgrammableWeb as an API repository and developer
resource,
while adding beneficial technologies and service provider relationships
to the
mix for everyone’s benefit.”
It makes a whole lot of sense to me. Cisco CEO John Chambers often repeats the phrase, ‘The Network is the Platform’ — which I believe to be true. With API’s, the platform actually becomes useful as a way for not just connecting endpoints, but different content repositories and data in a way that end-users will (hopefully) benefit from.
