Accenture has agreed to acquire Ookla, a company that the prospective new owners describe as focused on network intelligence, competitive benchmarking, and customer experience analytics.
Ookla, which was formed by Ziff Davis in 2006, offers four main products: Speedtest, Downdetector, Ekahau, and RootMetrics.
No purchase price or other details were included in the press release about the Accenture acquisition of Ookla, which was issued at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The company’s technology provides insights at the network, device, and application layers by capturing more than 1,000 attributes per test. Accenture provided a high-level view of what Ookla offers its clients:
- Communications service providers will gain “deep technical visibility” into autonomous networks to benchmark and plan capital investment and reduce costs by leveraging real-time data, predictive simulations, and AI-driven insights.
- Hyperscalers and cloud providers will be able to ensure the resilience of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and edge data center reliance.
- Enterprises will be able to design and troubleshoot mission-critical private 5G and Wi-Fi networks using Ekahau’s specialized hardware and software.
Ookla’s team consists of approximately 430 experts who have access to more than 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month. These are complemented by controlled drive, walk and embedded testing options. They provide insights on quality of service (QoS), radio frequency (RF) signal data, and quality of experience (QoE)
“Modern networks have evolved from simple infrastructure into business-critical platforms,” said Accenture chair and CEO Julie Sweet in the press release about the acquisition of Ookla.
“Without the ability to measure performance, organizations cannot optimize experience, revenue, or security. By acquiring Ookla, we will help our clients across business and government scale AI safely and build the trusted data foundations they need to deliver the reliable, seamless connectivity that creates value.”
An example of the type of service Ookla provides to the telecommunications ecosystem is a test it conducted last month in conjunction with Ericsson. The companies demonstrated a methodology by which 5G network slices can be measured and validated.
