Symbian and Accenture
With the recent mobile department upheavals at Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Symbian, many mobile developers are now finding themselves working on different things and in some cases for different companies.
I was interested to hear that Nokia’s Symbian Professional Services to be acquired by Accenture. This team of 165 people…
"provides engineering consulting and product development services on a global basis to mobile phone manufacturers, as well as chip manufacturers and mobile operators".
While I can see why Nokia didn’t want to retain these ex-Symbian people because it has similar people at Nokia, I wonder why they didn’t become part of the Symbian Foundation. Maybe it’s because the Foundation needs to be less commercial (not seen to be selling services) and more of a facilitator for everyone.
Whatever the reason, 165 people needed a new home independent of Nokia and the Symbian Foundation. Making all these people redundant wouldn’t have been the correct thing to do because the Professional Services team is still a valuable and much needed resource. Transfer to Accenture is a pragmatic solution that sees Accenture gaining expertise in Symbian OS. The only downside I can see is that consultancy provided by Accenture is likely to be much more expensive than it was via the old Symbian.
