What Ookla Adds to Accenture Following the Ziff Davis Deal
6 min read
Accenture has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Ookla — the global leader in network intelligence, competitive benchmarking, and customer experience analytics — as part of a $1.2 billion cash acquisition of Ziff Davis's entire Connectivity division. The transaction transfers Speedtest®, Downdetector®, Ekahau®, and RootMetrics® to Accenture, adding one of the world's most recognisable and data-rich network measurement platforms to a consulting portfolio that already spans telecom, hyperscaler, and enterprise transformation services globally.
What Accenture Is Actually Buying
The Connectivity division generated $231 million in revenues in 2025 — roughly 16% of Ziff Davis's total revenue — and represents the accumulated value of a decade of strategic bolt-on acquisitions. Ziff Davis originally acquired Ookla for $15 million in 2014, a price that in retrospect looks like one of the decade's more prescient technology investments. RootMetrics followed in 2016. The division capitalised on the global 5G rollout and pandemic-driven bandwidth demand to build a dominant position across four distinct but complementary product lines:
- Speedtest® — The world's most widely used network speed testing platform, anchoring Ookla's data platform with more than 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month. Each test captures over 1,000 attributes — creating one of the richest real-world network performance datasets in existence.
- Downdetector® — A real-time outage and service disruption detection platform that crowdsources incident signals from millions of users, enabling faster identification and response to network and application failures.
- Ekahau® — An enterprise Wi-Fi planning, design, and optimisation platform that enables IT teams to design, deploy, and troubleshoot wireless networks with scientific precision — a capability of increasing strategic importance as enterprises build high-density Wi-Fi environments for AI workloads and hybrid work.
- RootMetrics® — A controlled network performance testing platform that complements Speedtest's consumer-driven data with rigorous drive, walk, and embedded testing — providing communications service providers and enterprises with independent, methodologically robust network benchmarking.
Ookla employs approximately 430 experts specialising in software engineering, radio frequency engineering, and data science — a team that brings rare technical depth in network measurement and intelligence to Accenture's services portfolio.
"With the Ookla portfolio, we will offer end-to-end network intelligence services essential for AI-based transformation. Speedtest 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."
— Manish Sharma, Chief Strategy and Services Officer, Accenture
Why Network Data Has Become Strategically Critical
The strategic logic of the acquisition rests on a structural shift in what network data represents to enterprise operations. Network measurement was once primarily a tool for telecommunications companies managing infrastructure performance. That has fundamentally changed. As AI scales across the enterprise, the insights captured at the network, device, and application layers have become critical inputs for a far broader set of business functions.
Ookla's data already feeds into fraud prevention models in banking, smart home and grid analytics in utilities, and traffic flow optimisation in retail. As AI agents require low-latency, always-on connectivity to function reliably, the ability to measure, benchmark, and optimise network performance becomes a foundational operational capability — not a specialist telco concern. The acquisition gives Accenture's clients a live, independent, globally sourced view of network performance across their own environments and relative to competitors.
"Joining Accenture will allow us to scale our premiere network data business across the world's largest enterprises and accelerate our goal of creating better connected experiences. Our combined capabilities will enable us to more effectively serve CSPs, AI infrastructure providers, edge data centers and enterprise networks. Together, we will redefine how the world measures, understands and experiences connectivity."
— Stephen Bye, CEO, Ookla
What It Means for Ziff Davis
For Ziff Davis, the deal represents a defining moment in a multi-year strategic streamlining effort led by CEO Vivek Shah. The Connectivity division — assembled through bolt-on acquisitions over a decade — is being sold at a price that represents approximately 80 times what was paid for Ookla alone in 2014. Ziff Davis shares rose more than 60% in early trading on announcement of the deal. The company plans to focus its remaining portfolio on its core enthusiast media brands — including IGN, Mashable, Everyday Health, and iBuyNewCar — with proceeds from the transaction directed toward general corporate purposes and capital allocation activities.
The Bigger Picture: Accenture's Acquisition Momentum
The Ookla acquisition is part of a broader pattern of strategic acquisitions through which Accenture is assembling the data, AI, and network intelligence capabilities needed to serve enterprises at the intersection of connectivity, cloud, and AI transformation. Earlier in 2026, the company announced the acquisition of Faculty — a UK-based AI firm and Palantir competitor — and Verum Partners, an infrastructure and capital projects management firm with expertise across mining, metals, transportation, logistics, and energy. Together, these moves reflect a deliberate strategy of building proprietary data and analytics assets that deepen Accenture's differentiation as AI becomes the primary driver of enterprise transformation at scale.
The acquisition is subject to customary regulatory approvals, with no financial terms beyond the total transaction value disclosed. Ziff Davis will continue to operate Speedtest and Downdetector until closing.
Key Takeaways
- Accenture is acquiring Ziff Davis's entire Connectivity division — including Ookla, Speedtest, Downdetector, Ekahau, and RootMetrics — for $1.2 billion in cash.
- The division generated $231 million in revenues in 2025; Ziff Davis originally acquired Ookla for just $15 million in 2014, representing an ~80x return on that investment.
- Ookla's platform captures 250 million+ consumer-initiated tests per month, each logging 1,000+ network attributes — one of the richest real-world connectivity datasets in existence.
- Network data is now critical across banking (fraud prevention), utilities (smart grid analytics), retail (traffic optimisation), and AI infrastructure — well beyond its telco origins.
- The deal is part of Accenture's broader 2026 acquisition strategy, which also includes UK AI firm Faculty and infrastructure advisor Verum Partners, building toward end-to-end AI transformation services.