Remember General DataComm? . . . Maybe not. Founded in 1969, GDC was big back in the days of modems, multiplexers and ATM, but then hit hard times and had to sell off three of its four divisions to survive bankruptcy.

Now the largely forgotten company is scrabbling back - in part by reassembling its former self.

"These guys have a chance of coming back," says Thomas Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., if the company can capitalize on its relationships with carriers to sell IP access gear.

No one's saying it's going to be easy. Earlier this summer, the company reclaimed Ahead Communications Systems , which had been GDC's ATM division until it was sold in 2001. Back then, GDC's founder and CEO Chuck Johnson called the deal a way to focus the company's efforts on "our network access business and make a return to profitability a more achievable priority."

In the meantime, the company that owned Ahead went bankrupt, defaulting on a $17 million note it issued to GDC as payment for the ATM division. As a result, Ahead emerged from bankruptcy at the end of June a wholly owned subsidiary of GDC.

"The combination of the two companies enhances the equipment portfolios and service offerings for both GDC's and Ahead's customer bases," the company said in a news release announcing the arrangement.

This might sound vague, but that's because the company doesn't yet have a clear view of what it will do with Ahead, says George Best, GDC's vice president of sales and marketing. "We're looking at how we can start to blend ATM with what people want today. That's how we'll study the issue over the next few months," Best says.

What people want today, he says, is IP network technology such as MPLS .

This is the latest turn for a company that at its peak had $300 million per year in revenue and had thousands of employees. Now revenue is $13.4 million, and the company has about 100 workers.

In GDC's heyday in the early 1990s, its fast-growing ATM division was one of the cutting-edge companies making carrier-grade ATM devices, but the expense of running that division drained the company's cash, says Tim Kraskey, who helped run the division from 1993 to 1995. "We're the ones that took the ATM division from a zero to a $45 million [annual spending] rate in 18 months," he says. "We were stripping cash out of the company every day, so the company was going to hit a brick wall unless they got an infusion of cash or moved the ATM group outside."

Kraskey left in 1995 with two other GDC ATM executives to start Sahara Networks, which was bought in 1997 for $212 million by Cascade Communications. Cascade was later bought by Ascend Communications, which was later bought by Lucent. Kraskey then worked as a venture capitalist for five years and is now vice president of marketing and business development for customer-interaction software vendor Spanlink.

Whitepapers

• Best Practices for HP Servers and HP Enterprise Virtual Array in a Microsoft Exchange
• Network-Wide Change Management Visibility with Route Analytics
• REMOTE CONTROL: How to Reduce the Cost, Complexity and Risk of Managing Your Distributed IT Infrastructure
• Steal This Script: Hands-On Tips for Service Impact Network Management
• The Case for an Untethered Enterprise
• Best Practices for WAN Optimization with Data Replication

View more LANS & WANS whitepapers

Webcasts

• WAN Optimization Editorial Webcast
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape
• High Availability for SQL Server 2005 Using Array-Based Replication and Host-Based Mirroring Technologies
• Technical Overview of Exchange Server 2007 with HP Servers and Storage

View more LANS & WANS webcasts

Special Reports

• Network World Executive GUide: The Virtualization Equation
• Get More From Your WAN
• Learn how to Keep your Mobile Workforce Connected
• WAN Optimization: How to rev up sluggish applications
• The Wireless Explosion
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more LANS & WANS special reports