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Downdetector, Speedtest sold to IT service provider Accenture in $1.2B deal

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In a statement, Julie Sweet, CEO and president of Accenture, said:

By acquiring Ookla, we will help our customers safely scale AI at the business and government levels and build the trusted data foundation needed to deliver reliable, seamless connectivity that creates value.

Current Accenture public sector clients include the US Air Force, the US Social Security Administration and, most recently, the US State Department.

Speedtest and Downdetector are popular among people who want help quickly testing their current internet speed and the status of online services, respectively. DownDetector is often cited in media reports discussing the availability of websites, apps, banks, and other things.

Under Ziff Davis, both programs also have business-to-business (B2B) applications. For example, using Speedtest, Ookla “collects, aggregates, and analyzes data for billions of mobile network samples daily, measuring radio signal levels, network coverage and availability, and [quality of experience] metrics for multiple connected experiences, such as streaming video, video conferencing, gaming, web browsing, and CDN and cloud provider performance, Ookla says. Currently, Speedtest claims telecom operators, regulatory and trade bodies, analysts, journalists and non-profit organizations as B2B clients.

Meanwhile, DownDetector Explorer is a monitoring tool that helps businesses detect outages. Customers include streaming services, banks, social networks and communications service providers.

If the Accenture acquisition closes, the IT consultancy will use Speedtest and DownDetector’s data to notify customers, and individual users will be subject to the new privacy policy and any other changes that Accenture potentially makes.

An Accenture spokesperson told Ars Technica that Accenture plans to operate Ookla “as a business it operates today.”



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