Accenture picks up Symbian development from Nokia

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.

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.