Editions and deployment

Nova is one product in three editions. They differ in where Nova runs and who operates it.

The editions

Edition	Operation	Status
Nova Native	on-premises: the complete stack on the organisation's own servers	available
Nova on BTP	on the SAP Business Technology Platform, embedded in the existing SAP landscape and its operating model	announced for Q4/2026 planned
Nova as a Service	in the cloud, operated as a service; no in-house infrastructure needed, ready to use in the browser	announced for Q2/2027 planned

Nova on BTP and Nova as a Service have been announced but are not yet available. Today, Nova runs on the operator's own servers.

Licence

Nova carries no licence cost per identity.

Technical deployment options

Containers on in-house servers

Nova Native runs in containers: one container for the application including the web interface, plus a PostgreSQL database. A Docker Compose configuration for the application and the database is available. What operation requires and how installation works is described in Requirements and Installation.

A single instance

Nova runs as a single instance with one application process. The background jobs run inside this process; several parallel instances would run them more than once. Nova handles more load through additional threads in the same process.

SAP via RFC

For SAP via RFC – as a target system and as the “SAP OM” source system – Nova needs the SAP NetWeaver RFC SDK, which is obtained from SAP. Without the SDK, the SAP functions stay switched off; the other connectors work independently of it.

SAP BTP with Kyma

For the Kyma runtime of the SAP Business Technology Platform (Kubernetes), there are templates that deploy the application and PostgreSQL – again with exactly one instance. They are currently used for demo installations. The Nova on BTP edition is announced for Q4/2026.

AI

AI functions are optional in every deployment option. Instead of a cloud provider, a local model can be connected via Ollama – see AI in Nova.