WestPoint · Network Optix · Nx Witness
Nx Witness is the video software from Network Optix. You install it on an ordinary machine, it finds the cameras and it starts recording. What is interesting is not what it does —they all do that— but everything it does not ask for in order to do it.
The problem it solves: well managed video across several locations without setting up a department to keep it running.
Video software for large installations comes with architecture behind it: a management server, a database, a user directory and a project lasting weeks. With a thousand cameras and a control room that gets paid for because it is needed. With sixty across five industrial units it gets paid for just the same and never gets used.
Nx fills that gap. One service per machine, a desktop client that finds the server on its own, and several servers joined into a single system where the operator does not need to know which machine the camera they have just opened is recorded on.
One detail that explains why it turns up in so many places: several well known camera brands sell their own video software and underneath it is this, with a different logo on it.
Five things worth understanding before you draw anything.
The five questions that decide a cloud project, answered here.
Where the recordings live: on your drive, at your site. Its cloud is there so you can get in from outside without opening ports and so a user can sign in with their account on any of your systems. Nothing more.
If the line goes down everything carries on recording and all you lose is access from outside. Anyone inside the network does not even notice.
The cost of uploading video: there is no continuous upload. The traffic appears when somebody watches from outside, and what you have to size is the site's upload for when three people open their phones at once.
What does leave the building is the accounts and the connection data, and that is processing of personal data even though it is not video. You can work without the cloud, with local users and a VPN; then remote access is IT's job.
And the way out: the archive can be mounted again on another Nx server, but another manufacturer's system will not read it. Leaving any VMS means exporting what matters and starting to record again; anyone who tells you otherwise, whatever the brand, has never done a migration.
By channel: one licence per camera, bought once and it stays in the system. Adding twenty cameras means buying twenty, with no price steps. Software maintenance is renewed separately: not renewing it does not switch anything off, it leaves you on the version you had — and the terms in force are asked for in writing.
As you grow, what you have to look at is not the licence: it is the machine. Recording and watching are different loads. A server that records a hundred and twenty cameras without breaking sweat chokes with six operators opening sixteen-way layouts.
Both sides, because the second one gets found out just the same.
You have several medium-sized sites, an IT team that already maintains servers, cameras from different brands already installed and an appetite for connecting the video to what you already use: attendance, shifts, intruder detection. Above all if somebody is going to write something around the video.
The specification asks for video and access control on the same platform, with a cardholder and an audit report: here they are two things integrated. Or hundreds of sites have to be federated with certified procedures. Or nobody on the customer's side wants to touch a server, in which case the comfortable part of Nx goes unused.
As standard: motion by zone, bookmarks, search by date and search by object fed with whatever metadata the cameras or the plug-ins send. That handles the day to day: finding the moment something changed.
What you add: analytics inside the camera and server plug-ins —number plates, line crossing, abandoned object, counting— which come in through the metadata kit and land on the same timeline.
The ceiling, the same as in nearly all video software: the analytics included answer «something has happened in this rectangle», not «what is happening». A few rules about movement do not tell the worker bending down to tie a shoelace from the one who has fallen over, and the price is paid in false alarms until the operator stops watching.
And it is time to say where we come from: in the same house there is IRIS Neural, the NVMS from Infinity Neural —the other company in the group, so we recommend it with an interest of our own and we say so first—. In many installations they live together: the VMS governs cameras, recording and retention; IRIS brings the understanding of the scene. With Nx living together is one of the easy cases, because the streams are accessible and both systems look at the same image without duplicating cameras.
Specifically, because «implementation» means nothing.
It splits well between two teams, and the split gets decided before handover: afterwards it decides itself, and it usually decides badly.
Almost nobody chooses video software by looking at a single platform. These are neighbours in the same conversation, and the index leads to all twenty.
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If you already have it, what we usually find is retention that is not what people think it is and rules that alert nobody. If you are looking at it, knowing how many cameras, how many sites and what has to be integrated is enough for us to tell you whether it is the way to go or whether your case asks for something else.
