The current financial crisis has produced a new round of record-breaking bankruptcies that overshadow those of the last crash caused by the dot com bust at the start of this decade. Measured by assets, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual (both September 2008) now take first and second place pushing Enron (December 2001) and WorldCom (July 2002), both record breakers in their day, down the league, but they still manage third and fifth positions respectively (GM, June 2009, intervenes at number four).

Enron still exists but only as the Enron Creditors Recovery Corporation, all its assets having been sold; the remaining assets of WorldCom (after a period trading under the old name of MCI) were eventually acquired by Verizon in 2005. But a third company many will remember from those heady days is still trading under the name it was known by when it went bankrupt—Global Crossing (GC).

When GC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2002 with assets of more than $30bn, it was then the fifth largest bankruptcy of all time—even today it still manages 14th place. How has GC survived, what is it doing today and is it likely to survive in its current reincarnation?

GC emerged from Chapter 11 in December 2003 with a plan of reorganisation in place that provided for majority ownership by Singapore Technologies Telemedia (ST Telemedia). The remaining shares are publicly traded.

The plan worked; GC's revenue for 2008 was more than $2.5bn, on which it generated an operating income of $273m—compare this with 2001 when revenue was around $3bn but it ended up reporting a loss of $10bn that led to the Chapter 11 filing. Today IP networking accounts for 80 per cent of Global Crossing's revenue, via a combination of its enterprise, indirect and wholesale data channels. The remainder of its revenue comes from other lines of business that have been built up through acquisitions.

This includes GC UK, a locally focused operation that has grown out of a number of acquisitions over the years including Racal (1999) and Fibernet (2006). The Fibernet business is key to GC's ongoing growth—as well as strengthening GC's UK infrastructure it also has a healthy user services business.

GC UK now offers network, security and professional services across all industry sectors but with a particular strength in the government and transport markets. For GC UK the provision of communications infrastructure is now a secondary rather than a primary focus. How else do you compete with BT and AT&T at the enterprise level? More recently GC has added in datacentre hosting services. The knowledge to do this is derived from the second subsidiary, GC Impsat.

GC acquired Impsat, a Latin American service provider, in 2007. An important part of Impsat's portfolio was data centre services and GC is now extending these offerings to other areas. In the UK, GC started offering managed hosting services out of a London-based facility in 2008 and it now has around 35 customers. Like many such providers GC does not own its own datacentres but uses a co-location provider. In London this is Global Switch, with which it has also partnered recently to provision a facility in Amsterdam. Longer term it plans to extend managed hosting services to Germany, Spain and France and another UK facility outside of London.

The market for managed hosting is standing up well in the current downturn as many organisations look to reduce the cost of inefficient and out of date in-house datacentre facilities and the interest in on-demand (or cloud-based if you prefer) services grows. That GC has diversified into this market as well as the broader services offered by GC UK gives it a base for ongoing expansion in the UK and beyond. Provided this is carried out in a measured fashion and the focus on profit is maintained GC can expect a healthy future and for the fiasco of 2002 to become a more and more distant bad memory.

Global Crossing is covered in Quocirca's free report Managed Hosting in Europe.