MSE buys assets of Touch America subsidary

MSE Technology Applications Inc. announced Tuesday that it has purchased the assets of Tetragenics, a subsidiary of Touch America.

By Leslie McCartney of The Montana Standard

Tetragenics, an electronic controls and monitoring subsidiary, was slated to close at the end of this year. The pur chase — the price was not disclosed — means that both the business and seven of its employees will stay in Butte. The remaining six employees have been offered other options or positions with Touch America.

After reading that Touch America planned to close Tetragenics, MSE contacted TA about purchasing the business.
“ We approached them,” said Don Peoples, president of MSE. “ We’ve had extreme ly good cooperation.”
The acquisition includes all assets of Tetragenics such as customers, contracts, pro prietary information and equipment and inventory. The business will no longer be called Tetragenics, but will be folded into the MSE structure and will be housed in the Thornton Building, a struc ture Montana Economic Revitalization and Development Institute bought in August and leased to MSE to house the Montana Information Technology Enterprise Center.

Peoples added that MSE found it important to pre serve the seven good-paying jobs and keep talent in the community.
“ We have a tremendous wealth of talent,” Peoples pointed out. “ We want to do whatever we can (to keep jobs in Butte).”

Vince Tonc, chief operating officer of MSE Inc., said that the company intends to grow the former Tetragenics and its customer base as part of the acquisition and that it is a good fit with MSE.
“ We have been providing instrumentation and control services for many years, starting with our federal research efforts and later expanding into the public sector. Tetragenics gives us additional products and skills and unique proprietary technology applicable to government and industry opportunities that we have targeted as attractive to us,” Tonc said.

Touch America will become a customer of MSE by continuing to use its former sub sidiary’s monitoring and control equipment and services.
The Butte-based telecommunication firm also lauded a “ forward-thinking” MSE’s and ini tiative in pursuing Tetragenics, said Liza Dennehy, vice president of planning for TA. Officials added that keeping the business, its good-paying jobs, and expertise in the commu nity is the right thing to do for Butte.

“ MSE believed their plans to expand their instrumentation and control capabilities matched our desire to exit that business. Through the work of the two companies and former Tetragenics’ employees, we reached this winning solution,” said Mike Zimmerman, Touch America’s vice president of business development.

— Reporter Leslie McCartney may be reached via e-mail at leslie.mccartney(at)(at)intch.com.

http://www.mtstandard.com/newslocal/lnews1.html