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Accenture buys Nokia's Symbian professional services unit

I was toying with the idea of making the headline for this post, ‘Accenture buys Nokia’s Symbian‘. It’d have certainly raised a few eyebrows, I reckon.

As it happens, this news is reasonably eyebrown-raising itself. Accenture, the seriously expensive, seriously thorough, seriously serious consulting chaps, are getting into mobile.

That, I think, is highly significant. There’s cash to be made. Serious cash, one imagines.

The Symbian Professional Services unit…

…provides engineering consulting and product development services on a global basis to mobile phone manufacturers, as well as chip manufacturers and mobile operators.

Clearly this is no longer a core business focus for Nokia.

In case you’re wondering more about the exact services the unit provides, here’s some further clarification:

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.

165 folk who used to work for Nokia are now joining the Accenture team. This makes a heckuvalot of sense for Accenture if they’re looking to break into the burgeoning mobile enterprise marketplace. Obviously there’s money to be made helping OEMs, mobile operators and so on. But there’s also a ton of cash to be made helping enterprise.

Good luck to the new joins to Accenture. I look forward to seeing what value they unlock.

The deal should be completed in Q3.