Last Friday, Nokia and Accenture announced that they had entered in to an agreement for Accenture to acquire Nokia's Symbian Professional Services unit, which is 'responsible for Symbian OS customer engineering and customer support'. Effectively, the unit provides technical expertise, in the form of a service consultancy, to companies from across the ecosystem: mobile operators, silicon vendors and device manufacturers. Read on for more.
The unit is a profit making enterprise and therefore does not fall within the scope of the non-profit Symbian Foundation. Nor is it directly responsible for development of the Symbian OS.
Nokia's Peter Rupke noted that, "this agreement allows the Symbian professional services team to realise its full potential in the supply of independent services to the open-source ecosystem... the transaction underscores Nokia’s commitment to the open-source community and the Symbian ecosystem." (source).
Furthermore, by selling the unit, Nokia places it on a level playing field with other companies providing professional support service within the Symbian ecosystem. It also gives the unit a greater degree of independence, which will likely benefit its relationships with third party manufacturers. Rather than consulting with a service unit, which is owned by a potential competitor, the unit's customers cannot consult with a 'neutral' service company.
'The unit provides engineering consulting and product development services on a global basis to mobile phone manufacturers, as well as chip manufacturers and mobile operators.
Services provided by the Symbian Professional Services teams include advanced technical support, techniques for enhancing performance, memory, and power, advanced error diagnosis and repair, and turnkey software development services that can be used in a range of technical environments.
Approximately 165 people will transfer to Accenture as a result of the agreement. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of third quarter 2009.'
