Accenture, the world's leading IT consulting and services provider, recently announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has acquired Ookla, a subsidiary of US digital media and Internet company Ziff Davis, Inc., for US$1.2 billion.
Speaking of Ookla, you may not have heard of it, but you must have used the company's product: SpeedTest.net, which is the world's most visited network speed test platform, providing users with 250 million broadband speed tests every month.
There is also Downdetector, which is often used by everyone to report platform access interruptions. It is also an Ookla product. This time Accenture is willing to bid $1.2 billion, which is also a very cost-effective deal for Ziff Davis, Inc., after all, it only spent $15 million to acquire Ookla in 2014.
It is worth noting that Ookla's own business is also very healthy, generating $231 million in revenue in 2025. This revenue accounts for 16% of the entire Ziff Davis, Inc. company's revenue in 2025, so Ziff Davis has not lost money in the years since the acquisition.
There are reasons why Accenture is willing to pay high prices for acquisitions:
The acquisition of Ookla will help our customers, including communications service providers, hyperscale cloud computing service providers and government agencies, optimize network infrastructure applications. Especially in the age of AI, reliability and security need to be ensured.
As an IT consulting firm, Accenture itself provides clients with comprehensive consulting services to help them build a trusted data foundation in digital transformation. The deal will therefore also strengthen Accenture's competitiveness in managed services, especially in 5G and Wi-Fi network optimization.
Ookla expects the deal to close in the next few months and will continue to be operated by Ziff Davis until the closing. Ookla currently has 430 employees focusing on areas such as software engineering, radio frequency engineering and data science.