Last week Accenture announced it was acquiring the Symbian services group from Nokia.
My initial reaction was that of shock. Only 165 professionals in a world where we are bombarded with news of an ecosystem with tens of thousands of applications and billions of downloads in the iPhone App Store?
But the Nokia unit does not work with business or consumer applications – it helps mobile phone companies with technical assistance such as memory optimization and product testing. So, it is a product engineering play in the mobile sector. Something a number of Indian vendors like Wipro have done for a while.(Wipro, incidentally bought Nokia’s mobile TV software unit in April)
I am intrigued to see how the services market evolves around enterprise mobile applications . The consumerization of mobile applications particularly via iPhone is putting all kinds of pressure on CIOs to develop their own mobile applications - while they wait from major software vendors to deliver their own.