In a press release, Accenture CEO and chair Julie Sweet said:
By acquiring Ookla, we are going to help our clients across business and government scale AI safely and construct the trusted data foundations they should deliver the reliable, seamless connectivity that creates value.
Current Accenture public sector clients include the US Air Force, the US Social Security Administration, and, recently, the US Department of State.
Speedtest and Downdetector are popular amongst people looking for something to assist quickly test their current web speed and the status of online services, respectively. Downdetector is commonly cited by media reports discussing the supply of internet sites, apps, banks, and more.
Under Ziff Davis, each programs even have business-to-business (B2B) applications. Using Speedtest, as an example, Ookla gathers, aggregates, and analyzes data for “billions of mobile network samples day by day, which measure radio signal levels, network coverage, and availability, and [quality of experience] metrics for a variety of connected experiences, comparable to streaming video, video conferencing, gaming, web browsing, and CDN and cloud provider performance,” Ookla says. Currently, Speedtest claims telecommunications operators, regulatory and trade bodies, analysts, journalists, and nonprofits as B2B customers.
Downdetector Explorer, meanwhile, is a monitoring tool that’s imagined to help businesses detect outages. Customers include streaming services, banks, social networks, and communication service providers.
Should Accenture’s acquisition close, the IT consultant will similarly use data from Speedtest and Downdetector to tell clients, and individual users will probably be subject to a brand new privacy policy and another changes Accenture potentially makes.
An Accenture spokesperson told Ars Technica that Accenture plans to operate the Ookla “business because it operates today.”
