Glitni | Summary of the Second Half of 2025

Glitni has been running at full throttle in the second half of 2025. The biggest change is our new office. Here's a quick summary of what we achieved - and didn't achieve. As honestly as we can, in retro format.

Highlights

We’ve had a great second half of 2025. Here are our highlights:

• We have 2 clients where we have 4 consultants, and 1 client where we have 2. We’ve gained 3 new clients in the past half-year. All new hires went straight into assignments, which felt great.
• We’ve got another signing, so we’ll soon be 15.
• We moved to our own office, which we’re very pleased with. Profitable growth gives us the freedom to invest further in the professional community.

Sales and projects - Consistently high activity - and everyone on assignments

Sales and projects | Roles we’ve taken on

At our clients we’ve been:

• data platform developers and architects
• data engineers
• team leads for data engineers
• dbt experts
• project managers for data platform cloud migration

Sales and projects | What we achieved

• We’ve established 2 large client teams. Glitni has over time built a solid client portfolio across industries. We’re fortunate to have landed at a major telecoms player, bringing in several people simultaneously. That was great, whilst also onboarding many new consultants just before and after the summer. 10 out of 14 of our people have the opportunity to work with other Glitni consultants every day - of course alongside the clients’ own staff.
• We continue to receive enquiries from clients, which we greatly appreciate! Many of these turn into something more. We’ve secured assignments at a media company, two grocery retailers and an insurance company - all new clients in the past half-year who reached out to us.
• We work across all major platforms and technologies. Our professional community shouldn’t be fixated on one platform or technology, and should instead be able to give independent advice on architecture and technology choices. In the past half-year we had assignments on GCP, Azure and AWS, on technologies including Databricks, Snowflake and BigQuery.

Sales and projects | Where we can improve

• Hourly rates still need to go up. Through project and role changes, we’ve increased hourly rates for the next half-year. Nevertheless, we still have some way to go. We unashamedly believe that specialist expertise deserves a premium over standard market rates.
• We have few framework agreements in the public sector, although we’re not pushing hard for presence there either. We’ve secured a framework agreement together with Knowit at the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, and qualified for some dynamic purchasing arrangements. We’ve also secured a framework agreement with Norges Bank and NBIM through Bindestrek.
• We’re still slow at productising and conceptualising, which could probably give us faster sales cycles and the opportunity to price in know-how. We have several concepts and solutions ready, but we still haven’t allocated enough time.

Recruitment - We’ve reached 15 employees!

We’re extremely focused on getting the right people on board. We have a lot of good activity - but our ambitions exceed our results.

Recruitment | What we achieved

We’re particularly pleased to have signed yet another highly skilled consultant, who will be joining us during the spring. We have a lot of good activity to attract even more talented colleagues. And we’re a whole team contributing to recruitment. That’s good - it’s impossible not to get even more results over time if we keep this up.

Recruitment | Where we can improve

• We need to continue working on balance in roles and backgrounds. Some simple ratios show that our workforce consists of:
  • 12 (soon 13) men, 2 women. Not good enough, in other words.
  • 12 (soon 13) highly experienced, 2 with growing experience.
  • 7 (soon 8) can take data platform developer roles, 12 can take data engineer roles and 3 are comfortable with project manager/adviser roles. Note that the same person can fulfil multiple roles.
• We’re now getting assistance from a professional recruitment firm to supplement our own efforts - especially because we want a less homogeneous team. The goal is to hire an additional 4-5 people during 2026.

Internal life - Glitni is moving!

Internal life | What we achieved

• We’ve moved to great new premises! We now have room for 20+. Our new address is Lakkegata 55, at Gronland in Oslo. On average, each of us is in the office about 1.3 times per week, but it’s still important as a symbol and gathering point. Without an office, it’s difficult to build culture and cohesion. But we’re managing it - we have nice workstations, enough space, a kitchen, small offices for digital meetings and a meeting room with space for 20 - plus additional meeting rooms and an auditorium in the neighbouring building.

• Speaking of symbols, we’ve gone all in on Glitni merch. Everything with the Glitni logo, in great colours.
  • The Glitni collection now consists of:
    • Sunglasses
    • Water bottle
    • Training top
    • Mouse pad
    • Reflector
    • Crewneck jumper
    • Oxford shirt
    • Stretch polo
    • Zip hoodie
    • Half-zip jumper

• We invest in the professional community. We still have a strong focus on our internal days. We’ve continued with professional lunches, where we run low-threshold demos at lunch every other week, for those who are in the office.
• We’ve established a share programme, so that all employees can own a part of Glitni. We’re building Glitni together, and everyone should have the opportunity to own a small part of the company.
• We have a really great social calendar. There’s great enthusiasm for initiatives and wanting to spend time together, and it’s really taking off next year (with a cabin trip, company outing, group training sessions, the Holmenkollen Relay and much more)
  • Social highlights in H2 were:
    • Cycling trip on Rallarvegen
    • Housewarming party
    • Christmas party

Internal life | Where we can improve

• As in H1, we can systematise professional development even more. Going forward, we want a clearer link from market trends/what we need as a company, to development plans for each consultant, to how this is reflected in our professional programme. We haven’t quite got started on this yet.
• We’re working on getting even better control of routines and legal requirements. We still spend extremely little time internally/on administration. Now that we’re mostly done with settling into the new office, we can systematically tackle a number of tasks that weren’t so important during the start-up phase - and get things documented.

Visibility - We have consistently high activity, and are reaping the rewards

Visibility | What we achieved

• We organised Oslo dbt Meetup number 10 in September, with great professional contributions from dbt Labs, Mikkel Dengsoe (Synq) and Oyvind Barsnes Eraker from NBIM. Topics included Fusion and MCP and agentic workflows.
• We’ve continued writing articles on glitni.no and producing episodes of the podcast “Datautforskerne” (Data Explorers). We’ve launched 16 podcast episodes so far, of which only 1 in the last half-year. That’s not good enough. On the article side we’ve been somewhat better - 4 articles were published in the last half-year:
  • Guide to data contracts
  • Declarative data platforms
  • How a community of practice can take control of data engineering standards
  • The difference between integration platforms and data platforms
• Regardless, our marketing strategy is working well for us. Besides Meetup and Datautforskerne, we regularly post professional opinions on LinkedIn. We notice that we regularly receive enquiries from potential clients and new employees. So we just need to keep at it.

Visibility | Where we can improve

• Working on visibility takes time, and we can get even better. We can get more people active on LinkedIn, Medium and other social media. But it must be driven by intrinsic motivation.
• We aim to contribute at more external events. As last half-year, we’ve participated in 2 professional gatherings where we were invited to speak about data engineering and data platforms, but could probably spend MUCH more time on this.

Follow our journey

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