Open-Plug to transform Mobile Software Deployment

Sophia Antipolis, France, February 1st, 2004 – A new company is being launched at 3GSM with a mission to transform the way software is integrated, validated and deployed for mobile handsets.

Founded in 2002, Open-Plug SA has completed an initial funding round giving the company more than $4.5 million to take its mobile software development platform to market.

Based in Sophia-Antipolis, France, Open-Plug is offering its FlexibleWareTM Suite, a software framework that enables software developers, chipset and handset makers and network operators to reduce the design time and cost of developing and managing mobile device software while opening standard platforms to easy addition of new features.

The company is headed- up by Eric Baissus, previously of Texas Instruments (TI) where he was one of the key initiators and contributors of the success of TI Riviera Software Initiative. Baissus is supported by a team of highly experienced embedded software developers and technical leaders in mobile firmware design and on-demand provisioning.

“Everyone in the mobile market value-chain is under pressure to get attractive new features and services into the marketplace quickly and at low cost, without compromising firmware stability,” said Baissus. “Open- Plug has been formed to make this possible even with rapidly increasing complexity taken into account and on mass market mobile terminal platforms”.

“We believe the FlexibleWareTM technology will significantly change how Mobile Phone Software is developed”, mentioned Michel Faure from Siparex. “The integration and validation process is significantly simplified and cuts development cost and integration time, providing chipset and phone makers for the first time with the flexibility to address quickly new market trends and operators customization demands, at production level as well as via field download.”

“The FlexibleWareTM technology has especially been designed to apply on both standard code and JAVA. “Java was believed to be the solution for maintenance and application upgrades” said Nicolas Landrin from T-Source, “but it has just created a significant need to maintain and upgrade continuously any software component on the phone, reaching from codecs, graphic functions to security applications……., Open-Plug had the vision and the unique expertise to address this challenge with it FlexibleWareTM Technology first, which leverage JAVA but do not stop there.”

The FlexibleWareTM suite consists of the FlexibleWareTM tools and the FlexibleWareTM framework (a small embedded engine running on the phone). The tool suite, includes a SDK for software developers . The SDK supports proprietary API's as well as Open APIs (Linux/Java). The Suite also turns any type of software at object code level into isolated executable components, which run then on top of a small engine integrated on the phone’s processor. This not only makes configuration of new handset designs fast, easy and costeffective, but also allows upgrades to be distributed to groups or individual users in the field without compromising firmware stability.

About OpenPlug:

Open-Plug was founded in the summer of 2002 by a team of developers with a strong background in embedded mobile software development, and familiar with the quickly expanding challenges associated with it. The company’s aim is to provide to the mobile phone industry an open framework providing a unique software design flow, which supports seamlessly and efficiently the value chain of embedded software development for Mobile terminals.

Open-Plug, 2600 Route des Crêtes, BP 176, 06903 Sophia-Antipolis, France

Tel: +33 4 97 25 50 50 ,

Fax: +33 4 97 25 50 79

Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

http://www.open-plug.com