Nova is the industrial communications, visualization and networking platform. It is a piece of software that you run on your own Linux-based hardware, whether that is an industrial PC with a touchscreen, or an ARM-based gateway. As long as it’s got an Intel or ARM processor and meets some basic requirements in terms of free storage, Nova will run. We can be hosted on all the popular distros, although if we have a choice, we prefer a lightweight base operating system such as Alpine. Our philosophy is to keep the base level as simple as possible, reducing the attack surface area, and letting Nova’s secure container implementations protect you from attacks and CVEs.
Why Use Nova?
Nova is secure. It was designed from the ground up to use the latest technologies and techniques, protecting your assets and your information. It runs only the most minimal services in the base level, using containerization and process isolation to separate components from each other. Unlike older products that use an antiquated single-process model, Nova is designed to ensure that a failure in one component will not take down the entire system. And because Nova is updated constantly, any security holes in upstream open source components will be closed within days rather than months.
Nova is proven. It has been deployed on over 3,500 devices as of the start of 2026, with several hundred of those being under device management. While we are just beginning to introduce Nova to the wider industrial market, the code has been tested in the most arduous applications over a period of years.
Nova is scalable. It can handle today’s complex configurations that often have tens of thousands of tags. It has been deployed in applications where it is browsing 40,000 tags from an OPC UA server, or 50,000 tags from an Allen-Bradley PLC. It can handle complex data types, letting you read a set of records from a SQL database and then write these records to a PLC as user defined types (UDTs).
Nova is transparent. Complex protocols demand powerful debugging and diagnostics so that you can see what is going on under the hood. No-one wants to configure their system and then sit there wondering why it’s not working. Comprehensive logging and status information, plus networking tools such as TCP connection validation and packet capture, let you see inside the black box, ensuring that you don’t waste your time finding that one option that is blocking your progress.
Nova is ease to use. Although Nova is configured via a web interface, it offers all the fluency of a traditional Windows application. Keyboard shortcuts, undo and redo, drag and drop, tag autocomplete and creation, and full clipboard support speed up your development process, and let you move configuration fragments from one device to another so that you do not spend time reinventing the wheel. While we try to reduce configuration times to a minimum, we know that power users will spend a lot of time working in the Nova UI, and so we strive to make that process as productive as possible.
Nova is manageable. All changes to your configuration are logged, so you can see what changed, and who changed it. If something breaks after “no-one touched anything”, you’ll be able to see if that is really true, and then undo any changes in seconds. All Nova devices can be enrolled in our Device Manager, which can be installed on premises or in the cloud to provide central firmware updates, status monitoring and configuration management. You can edit your configuration on the device manager, just as if you were editing on the device. Updates are synchronized in both direction, with only the changes being sent to minimize bandwidth usage.
Nova is connected. Nova can collect data from a huge variety of industrial devices, and push that data to backend systems using MQTT, OPC UA or via connections to enterprise databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL. Nova’s architecture allows new communications drivers to be added in days rather than months. The product’s networking features support modern VPN protocols like Wireguard and Tailscale, removing the need for dedicated remote access hardware and expensive subscriptions.
Nova is extensible. Even if Nova’s own functionality can handle 99% of your application, you may want to use a tool like Node-RED or a language like Python to extend it further. Nova makes this easy, with an SDK container in which you can run your own code, plus the ability to add custom or predefined containers. You can literally add Node-RED or Mosquitto or a PostgreSQL instance to your application with just a couple of clicks.
Nova is dynamic. Most importantly of all, Nova is a living product with an ambitious roadmap and constant updates. We aim to release new features every one to two weeks, and are constantly extending the product in response to customer feedback. When a customer comes up with an idea, we don’t demand a fifteen page business case. Instead, if it looks cool and if it makes the customer’s life easier, we go ahead and implement it. Nova’s architecture was designed to make this simple: We knew we wouldn’t get everything 100% right, so we made it easy for us add features and expand functionality to meet our customers’ needs.