October 12th, 2009
Are Mac OS X and Apple servers making inroads with the Feds?
A recent article points to traction in the goverment market by a Mac-based surveillance system vendor. Despite the resistance from PC-centric IT managers, the Mac’s performance and easy support appears to be winning contracts.
A Security Systems News story by L. Samuel Pfeifle tells of videoNEXT, a company offering a range of video surveillance software that runs on Mac OS X clients and servers. In the summer, the company released Cavu Free, Cavu and Cavu Pro: iPhone-based surveilance management client apps costing nothing (go figure), $19.99, and $49.99, respectively.
According to a government VAR sales manager quoted in the story, the “Mac conversation” begins with the Mac’s lower profile with the hacker community. Later on in the purchasing process, the customer is won over by the Mac’s better performance, storage availability, and ease of use, all of which come at the same price point as a competing Windows system, he said.
According to Chris Gettings, CEO and president of VideoNEXT, quoted in the story, there are still a number of hurdles when approaching government IT shops. He said sites familiar with Linux systems offer much less resistance.
In addition, Gettings reported that Apple’s hardware decisions made integration and quality assurance easier.
The reason Gettings likes Apple hardware is because of its consistency. He said he can order two Dell servers two weeks apart and find that small things like a specific chip has been changed on the motherboard, which doesn’t show up on the specifications, but can slightly affect his software’s performance.
With Apple “it sounds like mumbo jumbo,” he said, but the company tunes every piece of the hardware to work together on its platform and exacts efficiency from the result. Thus, Gettings claimed, he can put as many as 60 cameras on one Apple server that, according the specifications, has the same performance abilities as a Dell or HP server that can only serve 50 cameras.
“That can be a measurable difference in some of these larger deployments,” Gettings said.
David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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