Accenture to acquire Nokia's Symbian Professional Services unit

Published by Rafe Blandford at 16:19 UTC, July 21st 2009

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.

Here's an extract from the press release: