Nokia sells off Symbian professional services to Accenture

When Nokia purchased Symbian a year ago, the supersize phone maker’s explicit plan was to open up Symbian’s mobile platform as a partly open-source suite of software so that application developers would feel comfortable developing for it and contributing their improvements to Symbian’s OS.

On Thursday, at our MobileBeat 2009 conference, Symbian announced the launch of Horizon, an application publishing platform for the Symbian OS.

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Today, Nokia announced the sale of its Symbian professional services group to global management consulting firm Accenture. The move is meant to distance Nokia enough from Symbian so that other handset manufacturers feel comfortable adopting the Symbian platform. All 165 of the group’s employees are being transferrred from Nokia to Accenture, a process that Nokia says will be completed by the end of September.