WASHINGTON—What would you say if you heard the U.S. Army has four video surveillance installations that are based on Apple’s OSX operating system, and use Apple servers? Or that a large government entity had just initiated an all-Apple installation?
The government doesn’t use Apple, does it?
Chris Gettings, CEO and president of VideoNEXT, a video management software manufacturer, is betting the government does, and it will. The VideoNEXT software is tuned for the Red Hat Linux and Apple operating environments, along with Windows, so that a user can go with both Red Hat’s operating system or Apple’s, in addition to Windows.
Gettings said Apple and Unix/Linux are attractive to government customers because of reliability and ease of use. “It just runs,” he said of the Apple platform. “You’re not going to have some of the memory-leak issues that seem to plague different versions of the Windows systems. And mission-critical customers appreciate that.” And while Red Hat is a Unix-like platform with its Linux, “with Apple they couple the Unix reliability with a world-class user interface. That’s the stumbling block on Red Hat. It’s a little bit complicated … The user interface for Apple is marvelous. It’s so easy to use and intuitive. It’s the hallmark of the platform.”