IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.
Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s data products into its own offerings that are targeted at helping communications service providers, hyperscalers, government entities, and other types of customers “optimize … mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks,” Accenture’s announcement today said.
Ookla’s platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.
Accenture plans to use data gathered from Ookla’s services for applications such as helping hyperscalers and cloud providers “ensure the resilience of AI infrastructure and edge datacenters, which deliver most of the inference workload,” improving fraud prevention in banks, conducting smart home analytics in utilities, and retail traffic optimization.
I actually sat through a pitch for downdetector. They have an enterprise product that shows historical data and trends. You have to pay per service monitored, it was wild.
Expect these to be put fully behind paywalls or some other privacy invading method to maximize value extraction. They use tools to gather outage info from all kinds of sources on social media, not their websites so they don’t rely on user reports as much as some might think.