Accenture picks up Symbian development from Nokia (computerworlduk.com)

That may be the strategy here - Symbian means the knowledge of building an OS that works for a wide range of models and specially lower end of cellular phones that rest of the world is catching up to.

== enterprise software?

Isn't that the core business of consulting firms like Accenture? To answer your question, eg. people in 1.5-2nd world countries who want to make a good living.

Why would Accenture need to use this to acquire new development talent? For starters, this is one division, not the entire company; and that division is now effectively the only people who can drive serious Symbian development. They are already working on the platform for the Japanese vendors who still use it, and now, if you want to target an application to the millions of people with Nokia phones, who else are you going to call?

I don't know who will own the direction of Symbian out of this move, but while Accenture has David Wood (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/dw2cco), I can't think of anyone better placed to continue Symbian development. Perhaps Accenture can be for Symbian what the Symbian Foundation was never allowed to do.

People re-train. As the demand for Symbian subsides - and that's still a multi-year proposition - Accenture can make these people useful on whatever other platforms people want to pay them to work with.

They're already in that position, having bought the professional services division of Symbian Software from Nokia. As Symbian Software did in their day, Accenture do a lot of work with the other remaining Symbian licensees.

Exactly! Supporting deprecated, but critical, infrastructure components is extremely lucrative for services companies. Accenture has been building up this sort of outsourced support operation for years and this just continues to expand on their current strategy. Support contracts are a steady revenue stream without the risk of continually needing to sell new projects.

Agreed. I was trying to say that the develpers have talent and if Accenture can work with them, they can move them on to other projects. Also as Symbian declines the cvalue of the remainnig developers with Symbian knowledge goes up - good for themand good for accenture. No price has been put on hte deal. looks like clever play by Acenture becuse as others have commmented, they get to be a preferred partner with NOkia on Windows mobile as well. Nokia may have shot itself in the foot again, losing loads of talent that it ends up hiring back from Accenture. That said, Nokia is in hte mess it is because the management and porbably the developers couldm't adapt quickly enough. Accenture will have to change that culture.

This deal involves 3000 employees moving from Nokia to Accenture. All of them work on Symbian in several different countries. It's a big bunch of people, even by Accenture's standards.