The consultancy continues its acquisition spree to speed clients’ transformations, with tangible results; Ookla adds slice monitoring to its Speedtest app with Ericsson
Ookla launched a tool with Ericsson to measure individual 5G network slices via its Speedtest app but this was quickly overshadowed by Accenture’s announcement that it is to acquire Ookla from Ziff Davis. It will pay $1.2 billion for the Connectivity business which includes Speedtest, Rootmetrics, Downdetector and Ekahau – massive crowdsourced data sets for consumer broadband, mobile performance, outage info and enterprise Wi-Fi. Here’s a summary of Ookla’s activities from its website.
Accenture described its prospective purchase as “a global leader in network intelligence, competitive benchmarking and customer experience analytics” and of course Accenture is a leading consultant for the world’s telcos. Its services extending from devising strategy to technology implementation and operations.
“With the Ookla portfolio, we will offer end-to-end network intelligence services essential for AI-based transformation,” said Manish Sharma, chief strategy and services officer, Accenture. “Speedtest [which captures more than 1,000 attributes per test] and RootMetrics define the experience; Downdetector identifies incidents faster; and Ekahau drives digital workplace transformation through superior Wi-Fi.
“In an era of omni-channel and agentic access, low-latency, zero-friction connectivity is a competitive necessity, and these tools give enterprises the power to build the high-performance environments they need.”
Commentator Sebastian Barros [subscription needed] notes, “The Accenture bet is bold: If you control the performance telemetry at a global scale, you can close the loop from measure to transformation faster than anybody else.”
Acquisition spree
In January, Accenture announced plans to acquire the UK-based firm Faculty, “to expand Accenture’s capabilities to help its clients reinvent core and critical business processes with safe and secure AI solutions that result in tangible outcomes.” Faculty competes against the controversial US company Palantir, and Faculty’s CEO, Marc Warner, will also become Accenture’s new CTO and join the company’s Global Management Committee. The two companies were already partners.
In February Accenture said it would buy Verum Partners, an infrastructure and capital projects management firm based in South America, “with deep expertise in the mining, metals, transportation, logistics, chemicals and energy industries”. Accenture added it would bring together its digital and advanced AI capabilities and Verum Partners’ leadership in on-site execution to help clients in Latin America make their infrastructure projects more efficient.
Back to measuring network slices…
Ericsson and Ookla claims this collaboration “marks a major milestone in the 5G-Advanced era, providing a way to validate the Quality of Experience (QoE) essential for the next generation of mobile applications and use cases”.
Ookla’s world famous Speedtest app can now also be used to identify and test specific network slices, demonstrating how service level agreements (SLAs) for differentiated services can be verified in real-time by both consumers and service providers.
“Network slicing is no longer a future concept; it is a commercial reality. However, you cannot manage what you cannot measure,” said Tibor Rathonyi, Senior Advisor at Ookla. “Our work with Ericsson is a pivotal first step in providing the transparency needed to prove the value of these premium 5G services to both consumers and enterprises.”
