Frost & Sullivan qualified 65 industrial connectivity vendors and benchmarked 10. Here is what the recognition means for the engineers, integrators, and end users we serve every day.
Frost & Sullivan has named Software Toolbox an Innovator in its Frost Radar™: Industrial Connectivity Software, 2026. Of the 65 vendors Frost & Sullivan qualified as having real commercial traction, live customer deployments, and differentiated capabilities, only 10 were selected for benchmarking. Software Toolbox earned an Innovation Score of 3.80 and a Growth Score of 3.40, and the analysts described us as the industrial interoperability and data operations enablement specialist.
We are proud of that. For three decades our job has been making heterogeneous industrial systems work together in real production architectures, from a single PLC on a packaging line to multisite DataOps deployments. Frost & Sullivan's analysts recognized that connectivity is no longer a protocol-counting contest. It is about making OT data scalable, contextualized, secure, and reusable. That is exactly where we have been investing.
What Frost & Sullivan saw
A few points from the report stood out to us:
- Our AI work is anchored in the connectivity problem. Frost & Sullivan called our AI activity in Industrial Connectivity "pragmatic and unusually close to the connectivity problem," singling out jonjon.ai for grounded troubleshooting and chatUNS.ai for conversational access to Unified Namespace data. The analysts' advice was to frame these as operational resilience tools rather than generic AI features. We could not agree more.
- Support is a strategic differentiator, not a cost center. The report notes that our support-led model earns credibility with customers who cannot tolerate prolonged troubleshooting when data flows stop. We can always be reached at support[at]softwaretoolbox.com.
- Data operations is already a third of our business. Cogent DataHub, OPC Router, and N3uron extend our role well beyond device connectivity into bridging, tunneling, contextualization, and enterprise integration, alongside the 140+ drivers in TOP Server.
Our Partner Velotic
We were also glad to see Velotic Kepware named the market leader and the Radar's Growth and Innovation leader. Velotic has been our strategic partner in industrial connectivity for three decades, and TOP Server shares its connectivity core with Velotic Kepware. When the category leader and one of its innovators have been building together for this long, customers get the best of both: a connectivity core proven across an enormous installed base, and a partner whose focus is making everything around it work.
What "Innovator" means for you on the plant floor
Analyst recognition is nice. It only matters if it shows up when you have a driver that will not connect, a quote you needed yesterday, or a license that has to be activated before the line restarts. Here is what we deliver to the everyday controls engineer, system integrator, and end user:
- Instant troubleshooting with jonjon.ai. jonjon.ai is grounded in our curated knowledge base and technical documentation for TOP Server, OmniServer, Cogent DataHub, OPC Router, and N3uron, so its answers come from how our products actually behave rather than generic internet advice. It is available around the clock at jonjon.ai, and it is built into our support pipeline: email support[at]softwaretoolbox.com or use our web form and jonjon provides a first-line response with a link to continue the conversation, resolving many issues outright and getting you to a human faster when it cannot.
- Human support engineers who will replicate your issue. When jonjon cannot get you there, our support team can. These are engineers who work with the same PLCs, drivers, and protocols you do, and who will work with you to replicate the issue, down to driver settings and device configuration, to find the root cause rather than guessing from a screenshot. Frost & Sullivan's report notes that time to response and time to resolution directly affect operations. We built the team around exactly that.
- Commercial velocity: same-day quotes. Industrial projects do not wait for a two-week quote cycle. Send us a request and you will have a quote the same day, whether it is a single OmniServer license or a multisite N3uron rollout. Our inbound team is backed by our own AI quoting tools, so speed does not come at the expense of accuracy.
- Self-service license activation at activation.softwaretoolbox.com. Activate your licenses on your schedule, including nights, weekends, and commissioning windows, with no phone call required.
- Deep expertise in the industries you work in. Our customer base spans more than 6,000 companies in 75 countries, and Frost & Sullivan noted that it is diversified across process, hybrid, discrete, and infrastructure-oriented industries. In practice that means our engineers know the specifics of oil and gas, data centers, pharmaceutical and beverage manufacturing, power, and buildings: the protocols, the compliance constraints, and the failure modes that show up at 2 a.m.
Where we go from here
Frost & Sullivan's recommendation to us is to keep using connectivity as the entry point into higher-value data operations, packaging repeatable architectures that customers and integrators can scale across sites. That is the road we are already on with N3uron, chatUNS.ai, and jonjon.ai. The Innovator designation tells us the direction is right. Your uptime tells us whether we are executing.
If you would like to see any of this in action, start a conversation at jonjon.ai, request a quote, or reach us here. Thank you to our customers and partners for pushing us to earn this.
Source: Frost & Sullivan, Frost Radar™: Industrial Connectivity Software, 2026 (July 2026).
