Accenture buys Symbian Professional Services

(By Philip Carnelley, Mon 20 July 2009, 10.10) Nokia is to sell its Symbian Professional Services unit to Accenture; terms of the deal were not disclosed. About 165 people will transfer to Accenture.

Symbian is the smartphone operating system that sprang from long-lamented British handheld pioneer, Psion, and now runs on all Nokia smartphones plus some others: it has over 40% share of the smartphone operating system market and is installed on over 200m handsets. Symbian was for a time jointly owned by several mobile phone manufacturers. It is now totally owned by Nokia, but at arm’s length, through the non-profit UK-based Symbian Foundation, as Nokia wishes it to be seen as a neutral platform to be adopted widely across the industry. Handing over the services and support aspect will help demonstrate its neutrality from Nokia. Symbian’s real challenge is to nurture an applications development ecosystem similar to that which has grown up around the iPhone.

We see this as an opportunistic move for Accenture: one that will help its penetration in its telecoms manufacturer accounts, as well as giving an additional, albeit fairly minor, revenue stream. For Nokia it is further evidence that it is examining all aspects of its business as it struggles to maintain its profitability levels in the face of the continuing tough market for handset sales (see Nokia "It's tough out there" for our discussion of just how tough).