Tieto & Harbr: Powering the Nordic data economy

The problem

Across the Nordic region, organizations are eager to realize the value of their data. What holds most of them back isn't ambition — it's knowing where to start.

Tieto — one of the largest technology companies in the region, with over 40 years of experience — set out to change that. The result is Data Nest, a data marketplace for finding, sharing, and monetizing data. To power it, Tieto chose Harbr.

"In our dialogue with customers and partners, it's clear that this isn't about a lack of ambition, but rather about capability," says Tommi Larsen, Head of Data & Insight Data Services at Tieto. "Most organizations are eager to realise the value of data and AI — but don't know where to start. Data Nest is our answer to that challenge."

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Ready-made for the market

Tieto's Data Services team came to the project with genuine domain depth. Their heritage includes decades running Infotorg, Norway's primary provider of public-sector data — giving them an unusually clear view of where data sharing breaks down in practice. The challenge wasn't understanding the problem. It was deciding how to build the solution.

Powering a multi-organization marketplace — one where different enterprises can share governed data with their own customers and partners, on their own terms — demands robust underlying infrastructure: access controls, data product management capabilities, subscription mechanics, governance tooling, connectors to a wide range of data platforms, and more.

They chose Harbr as the platform to build Data Nest on. Selecting a proven technology as a foundation for Data Nest allowed Tieto to launch quickly — and immediately capitalize on its deep knowledge of data and decades of domain experience working with top organizations in the region.

"Our goal is to make it possible for users without data or AI expertise to generate real value. We've built the car so our customers can focus on the journey," as Larsen puts it.

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A marketplace model that Harbr's platform makes possible

Harbr is model-agnostic by design. Customers use Harbr to power different kinds of data sharing — internal data exchanges, governed partner ecosystems, and commercial data products. Tieto's use case is a data marketplace: a many-to-many environment where data suppliers and data consumers transact across organizational lines, with Tieto operating the platform in the middle.

Data Nest isn't a simple bilateral data feed or an internal catalog. It's a commercial marketplace with multiple concurrent suppliers, each publishing products to a shared exchange and managing their own customer subscriptions.

Weeks, not quarters

Since Data Nest’s launch in May 2025, strong uptake among Tieto’s ecosystem partners suggests the model is working. Among the dozens of organizations that have joined Data Nest is one of the region’s largest banks, with over €100billion in assets under management. Within weeks of joining as a data supplier, the bank is already creating commercial data products and publishing them for their own customers and partners. For an enterprise in a heavily-regulated industry, where governance and compliance concerns can delay data commercialization initiatives indefinitely, this timeline reflects what becomes possible when the underlying technology is designed for and proven to handle it.

For Tieto, it validates the core premise of Data Nest: that organizations sitting on valuable data can become data businesses quickly, without needing to build the technical infrastructure themselves. For Harbr, it's further evidence that the platform supports not just ambitious data businesses, but organizations that want to launch and operate their own data marketplace.