By Khali Henderson

EarthLink Inc. announced Thursday that Michael Toplisek, a longtime executive at  XO Communications, has been named executive vice president of IT Services at EarthLink.

Toplisek most recently was president of Concentric Cloud Solutions, an XO company, which launched its solutions May 1.

In his new post, Toplisek will oversee IT Services product development, management and marketing for EarthLink’s IT Services business, which includes virtualization, managed security, application services, managed support and data center services. EarthLink launched its business IT services in April and added a hosted desktop, EarthLink Cloud Workspace, offer earlier this week.

Toplisek, replaces Brian Fink, who has served as acting leader of EarthLink’s IT Services initiatives. Fink will continue in his role as CTO.

Toplisek has more than 20 years of leadership experience in IT Infrastructure and the communications industry. In addition to launching a new cloud solutions business for XO, Toplisek was hired in fall 2009 as the company’s chief marketing officer. 

Prior to XO, Toplisek spent 14 years at Global Crossing, including posts as senior vice president, global enterprise and collaboration, and regional vice president of business services. Earlier in his career, he held sales leadership positions at Frontier Communications and MCI Telecommunications.

EarthLink offers managed IT services including cloud computing, data centers, virtualization, security, applications and support services, in addition to nationwide data and voice IP services. The company operates a network including 28,800 route fiber miles, 90 metro fiber rings and four secure data centers.