Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has completed the acquisition of the professional services unit of Nokia (NOK), responsible for providing engineering and support of the Symbian operating system to mobile device manufacturers and service providers. The Symbian operating system is the world’s most widely used platform for smartphones.

The acquired unit will focus on providing global companies with a broad range of embedded software services and capabilities for mobile devices and will be called Accenture Embedded Mobility Services. The new capabilities will complement and enhance the product engineering and software development services that Accenture already provides to global clients today, helping to reduce development costs and time to market while enhancing product quality and functionality.

“The new team members from Nokia have the skills that will enable Accenture to offer even stronger support of the Symbian OS,” said Jean Laurent Poitou, managing director of Accenture’s Electronics & High Tech industry group. “We also intend to use their skills to help players in the mobile solutions ecosystem address ever-more-demanding time-to-market and quality requirements in other mobile device environments such as Android and other Linux variants, Apple iPhone OS, RIM, and WindowsMobile*.”

The new services and capabilities Accenture will offer include: advanced engineering and technical support; innovative device performance optimization solutions, such as performance, memory and power; advanced error diagnosis and fixing; turn-key software development services for critical areas of the mobile software stack leveraging Accenture’s offshore capabilities; and program management services to support complex phone programs.

Accenture’s new capabilities will also help address one of the mobile industry’s most challenging problems: testing. According to an Accenture survey, 88 per cent of companies surveyed do not do a good job of testing, which typically consumes about one_third of the product development process and has a major impact on quality, cost and time to market.

With the new Embedded Mobility Services team, Accenture can now deliver an end_to_end testing framework consisting of remote, simulator_ based and automated testing. These capabilities enable Accenture to help clients achieve higher efficiencies, better test strategy and planning, out­sourcing, and a scalable resource pool for improved execution.

In addition to Accenture Embedded Mobility Services, Accenture’s Product Software Solutions unit provides Internet technology engineering services that enable communications between servers and/or desktops and end devices, soft_panels and portable terminals that align with today’s growth trends in downloadable content, downloadable applications and social networking. The unit also provides network technology engineering services that reside on network systems, switches and routers to help optimize communication, transmission speed, and transmission integrity.