Accenture Completes Acquisition of Nokia Services Unit

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.