Businessman relaunches local Web site

LYNN – High-technology entrepreneur Lowell Gray has again purchased the local Internet company Shore.Net, which he sold to Virginia-based Primus nine years ago.”I’m going back to what I know best,” Gray said Thursday, explaining that he never sold the Oxford Street building, only the business. “Primus decided they wanted to move on. They offered me the assets of the old Shore.Net for a good price and I’m relaunching the old name. Everything that was here before stays.”Gray, a Nahant resident, founded the Internet service provider Shore.Net in 1993 and sold it to Primus in 2000. He then purchased the former Hotel Oxford and Joseph’s Bar, two seedy establishments a couple of doors down the street. He renovated both, turning the upper stories into three condominiums and creating the upscale Oxford Street Grille on the ground floor. The restaurant failed to prosper but has since found a new owner and recently re-opened as the Blue Ox.Ivan Santucci, sales and marketing manager at Shore.Net, said the company will rebuild, using a core of commercial customers that admittedly represent only a fraction of those who once relied on the business for Internet access.Gray said the new Shore.Net, purchased last month, will not focus on providing Internet access. “Those days are gone,” he said. “Internet access is everywhere. Our focus is going to be on hosting application software, mostly for businesses, and helping companies move to the new model of software as a service.”In the industry, such services are known as cloud computers. The next-generation Internet service provides companies with an infrastructure that gives access to their applications 24/7 through the Web.”The customer doesn’t even have to know where the software comes from. It’s done for you somewhere out there, somewhere up in the clouds, which is why it’s referred to as cloud computing,” he said, citing for example salesforce.com, which provides online tools to sales companies.”The whole software licensing model is changing. You no longer pay for individual licenses for your computers and then for all the upgrades,” he said. “And you don’t need to maintain the software. The service company does that for you and you pay for what you use.”Adobe offers a popular online version of its Photoshop program, so users are no longer required to load and store it on their computers.”The nice thing about buying back my old company is that there is still an existing business there, so I have been able to hire a couple of people and we’re putting everything back in order. The needs of the Internet are greater than they ever were,” said Gray, noting that Shore.Net will offer co-location space for servers at competitive prices.Besides, he said, “Oxford Street is coming back to life.”For more information about Shore.Net products and services, go online to www.shore.net.