Impact Brief: Embrace Acquires SpeedCurve, Advancing User-Focused Observability with Deep Web Performance Insight

Context/Background

Observability emerged from backend systems: logs, metrics, distributed traces, and infrastructure telemetry. While effective for service health, these tools rarely captured how users actually experienced applications. Frontend and mobile teams compensated with specialized tools that were deep but isolated, leaving enterprises with fragmented views, inconsistent data models, and no shared understanding of how performance affects conversion, engagement, or reliability.

This gap is precisely where Embrace and SpeedCurve fit. Embrace built a mobile-first, user-centric platform and expanded into web RUM using OpenTelemetry, allowing frontend and backend teams to rely on shared standards and common semantics. SpeedCurve established itself as the leading authority in web performance, defining Core Web Vitals, advancing JavaScript performance analytics, and delivering widely adopted synthetic and real-user monitoring. Together, they cover the full spectrum of user experience telemetry across devices and contexts.

EMA’s March 2025 research report, “The State of OpenTelemetry Adoption in Enterprise IT” shows why this convergence matters. RUM is the top planned OpenTelemetry experimentation area; 70% of enterprises view user experience as the most valuable observability signal and 67% plan to fully instrument environments with OTel. Organizations want unified visibility across user interactions and underlying systems, but they want it through open, composable architectures, not proprietary monoliths. The Embrace/SpeedCurve combination aligns directly with these expectations by elevating user- centric telemetry as the foundation of modern reliability.

As AI-driven development accelerates, engineering teams need deeper context to understand how code changes affect real users. Embrace’s OTel-native data foundation and SpeedCurve’s granular web insights provide the necessary fidelity to tie performance to business outcomes. The combined platform reframes observability around user experience, which is increasingly the most critical determinant of digital success.

Key Ramifications

The acquisition delivers several important ramifications for the observability, performance, and digital-experi- ence markets.

Elevates user-focused observability through combined depth

The acquisition fuses SpeedCurve’s web-performance precision with Embrace’s OTel-native mobile and web RUM, creating the most complete cross-channel view of user experience available today. SpeedCurve brings unmatched expertise in Core Web Vitals, JavaScript execution, and synthetic regression testing, while Embrace contributes unsampled session timelines and OTel-aligned telemetry. Together, they deliver a unified user-journey model that backend-centric suites have not been able to match, shifting observability closer to the point where customers actually perceive performance and reliability.

Integrates performance engineering directly into the observability workflow

Historically, web-performance teams operated in parallel with observability and SRE groups, relying on toolchains and data models disconnected from backend systems. The combined platform merges SpeedCurve’s synthetic and RUM data with Embrace’s cross-platform session context, enabling shared visibility and shared prioritization across frontend, mobile, and backend teams. By positioning user-impact signals as first-class observability data, Embrace and SpeedCurve eliminate the longstanding divide between performance engineering and reliability engineering.

Strengthens the shift toward open, composable observability architectures

The acquisition reinforces market momentum toward OpenTelemetry-based, vendor-neutral observability. SpeedCurve customers retain the ability to feed data to existing backends while gaining richer OTel-native context through Embrace. Embrace customers, in turn, gain advanced web performance visibility without being forced into a monolithic platform. This positions Embrace as a leading option for organizations pursuing composable architectures built on open standards rather than proprietary agents or siloed data pipelines.

Establishes a strong data foundation for AI- driven reliability operations

AI-powered observability requires high-fidelity signals about what users actually experience, not just backend infrastructure metrics. SpeedCurve’s page construction data, synthetic regression detection, and real-user metrics provide the granularity needed for AI models to distinguish meaningful degradations from technical noise. Combined with Embrace’s enriched session timelines, MCP Server, and OTel-native data structure, the merged platform offers one of the most complete datasets available for predictive anomaly detection and autonomous operations across mobile and web. Competitors relying solely on backend traces will struggle to deliver equivalent insight.

EMA Perspective

The Embrace/SpeedCurve acquisition aligns directly with the enterprise priorities highlighted in EMA’s March 2025 OpenTelemetry research. As organizations mature, they increasingly require a unified, standards-based data model spanning web performance, mobile behavior, backend interactions, and business events. Embrace’s acquisition positions it squarely at the center of this shift.

Embrace already distinguished itself through its mobile- native, OTel-first architecture and its expansion into web RUM. Its prior release demonstrated a cross-plat- form session-centric model that competitors struggled to replicate, reinforced by active participation in OTel SIGs and strong semantic alignment. SpeedCurve now completes that vision with best-in-class web depth – Core Web Vitals expertise, JavaScript performance analytics, regression monitoring, and a decade of synthetic testing leadership. Few observability vendors possess this combined breadth and depth of user-experience fidelity.

The acquisition also addresses major enterprise barriers to adopting OpenTelemetry: implementation complexity, skills shortages, and inconsistent cross-team data. By standardizing mobile, web, and synthetic data on OTel and integrating them with backend systems already instrumented through OTel collectors, Embrace reduces the complexity that many enterprises identify as their top challenge. The combined platform allows organizations to unify telemetry without abandoning existing investments.

A similar strategic pattern can be seen in IBM’s consolidation of Instana, Turbonomic, and Concert, which unified application performance, resource optimization, and automated remediation into a single operational decision layer. Embrace and SpeedCurve are executing the same architectural intent, but anchored in a different and equally critical dimension of reliability: the user experience, where performance issues translate most directly into customer impact and revenue risk. Where IBM integrated the supply side of reliability – infrastructure, capacity, and service health – Embrace is unifying the demand side by correlating real-user behavior across mobile, web, and synthetics with backend context through OpenTelemetry. Both approaches reflect a clear industry trajectory toward multi-signal, AI-ready operational models. Embrace, however, aligns this model directly to business impact, positioning user experience as the primary lens for understanding digital reliability and elevating experience-driven operations as the next stage of observability maturity.

Embrace now exemplifies the trajectory of modern observability: open, user-centric, and anchored in real experience rather than infrastructure alone.