Jo Harlow, executive vice president for Smart Devices, Nokia, said:
"Our collaboration with Accenture allows us to meet our ongoing commitment to support our Symbian smartphone customers and continue to leverage the talent that has the deepest experience on the platform. As we move our primary smartphone platform to Windows Phone, we will look to explore potential opportunities to tap this talent pool as they develop and expand their knowledge and capabilities beyond Symbian."
The companies also announced that Avanade, a service company majority owned by Accenture and which focuses on Microsoft technologies, will provide further services to Nokia. This underlines Accenture position of strength as the preferred service supplier for Nokia.
As we noted in our original story:
In effect, this an out-sourcing agreement that will see Accenture become Nokia's preferred partner for external smartphone development and service support activities. Accenture will take over responsibility, from Nokia, for transitioning a number of software engineers from Symbian to other platforms.
This should allow Nokia to focus more of its efforts on executing a successful transition to Windows Phone for its smartphone device portfolio and services. It further underlines Stephen Elop's determination to switch Nokia to its new strategy as quickly and as efficiently as possible in order to allow a concentrated focus on Windows Phone.
The impact on Nokia's Symbian software activity, such as the support of phones and future software upgrades, is likely to be minimal (in the context of current plans). Nokia has already put in place a time-line for its remaining future Symbian devices and software updates and much of the work for these has already been carried out. While the amount of Symbian-related software activities will decrease over the next few years, as Nokia undertakes its transition to Windows Phone, it will continue as long as is necessary.
More details on today's announcement is available in the press release.