Accenture completes its acquisition of the professional services unit of Nokia, a move that will help take Accenture more directly into the business of servicing embedded and mobile operating systems.Accenture announced Oct. 16 that it has completed its acquisition of Nokia's
Symbian Professional Services unit, a move that will help take Accenture more
directly into the business of servicing embedded and mobile operating systems.
The former Nokia unit that Accenture has acquired is "responsible for
providing engineering and support of the Symbian operating system to mobile
device manufacturers and service providers. The Symbian operating system is the
world's most widely used platform for smartphones," Accenture said in a
news release.
The release continued, "The acquired unit will focus on providing
global companies with a broad range of embedded software services and
capabilities for mobile devices and will be called Accenture Embedded Mobility
Services. The new capabilities will complement and enhance the product
engineering and software development services that Accenture already provides
to global clients today, helping to reduce development costs and time to market
while enhancing product quality and functionality."
"The new team members from Nokia have the skills that will enable
Accenture to offer even stronger support of the Symbian OS," Jean Laurent
Poitou, managing director of Accenture's Electronics & High Tech industry
group, said in a statement. "We also intend to use their skills to help
players in the mobile solutions ecosystem address ever more demanding
time-to-market and quality requirements in other mobile device environments
such as Android and other Linux variants, Apple iPhone OS, RIM, and Windows
Mobile." The statement continued:
"The new services and
capabilities Accenture will offer include:
advanced engineering and
technical support;
innovative device performance
optimization solutions, such as performance, memory and power;
advanced error diagnosis and
fixing;
turn-key software development
services for critical areas of the mobile software stack leveraging Accenture's
offshore capabilities; and,
program management services to support
complex phone programs."
With the 175 engineers Accenture gains in the acquisition, the company's "new
capabilities will also help address one of the mobile industry's most
challenging problems: testing. According to an Accenture survey, 88 per cent of
companies surveyed do not do a good job of testing, which typically consumes
about one-third of the product development process and has a major impact on
quality, cost and time to market.
"With the new Embedded Mobility Services team, Accenture can now
deliver an end-to-end testing framework consisting of remote, simulator- based
and automated testing. These capabilities enable Accenture to help clients
achieve higher efficiencies, better test strategy and planning, outsourcing,
and a scalable resource pool for improved execution," the statement said.