AT&T Opens Innovation Center

DALLAS -- AT&T* today celebrated the grand opening of its AT&T Foundry innovation center in Plano, Texas, marking a new phase in its initiative to expand opportunities for developers and speed the pace of innovation to consumers and enterprises.

The Plano center is the first of three permanent AT&T Foundry innovation centers opening worldwide. Permanent centers in Palo Alto, California, and Ra'anana, Israel, are planned to open later this year. Temporary centers opened in Texas, California and Israel in 2010, and more than two dozen multi-company projects are already under way. Initial development tracks include telehealth, HTML5, new ways to deliver rich media, advanced check-in and location-based applications, and APIs, application programming interfaces that make network services easily available to developers.

"At the AT&T Foundry, we bring the expertise of AT&T Labs into a collaborative environment with key industry technology providers and developers from Silicon Valley and all over the world," said AT&T CTO John Donovan. "Together, we innovate in new ways, fast-tracking projects to cut the time from idea engagement to market by 3X."

Developers who work in the AT&T Foundry innovation centers get access to AT&T network capabilities and test beds, in addition to technology experts and project coaches. The Plano center is an LTE test environment, and has connectivity to AT&T Labs and the other innovation centers. Developers also can participate virtually through AT&T's developer portal (link: http://developer.att.com).

"AT&T understands the need for speed in app development, and they're bringing the people and technology resources together to get things done quickly," said Preston Rutherford, director of partnerships for Cooliris, a company participating in an AT&T Foundry Plano project. "We're looking forward to tapping into the AT&T Foundry Plano for the innovation center project surrounding our new group photo sharing application LiveShare."

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T)

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU)