MCI acquires Totality

MCI has agreed to acquire Totality, a six-year-old designer of enterprise networks and provider of remote managed services for business-critical applications.

Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal, which is MCI’s first acquisition of a company since it agreed to merge with Verizon Communications this spring.

Totality--whose clients include American Airlines, Best Buy and Stanford University Medical Center--will allow its new parent company to manage enterprise applications outside of its own managed hosting centers, MCI said in a statement today. “With Totality's capabilities, MCI will be able to manage and monitor a customer's applications no matter where they are hosted.”

In March, Totality announced “joining forces” with MCI rival AT&T to serve business customers. AT&T “will continue to support any existing contracts utilizing Totality,” an AT&T spokesman said, refusing to comment further on the anticipated effects of the MCI acquisition on that partnership.

Nearly a quarter of MCI’s $4.8 billion first-quarter revenue came from the enterprise market, with data service revenue down 3% from a year earlier due to price erosion and migration to IP services.

In late February 2005, MCI completed the acquisition of Network Securities Technologies (a.k.a. NetSec), a privately held provider of managed security services, for $106 million in cash.