Eistein Fosli

Founder & CEO Open iT

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Eistein Fosli is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Open iT, a software license optimization company he established in Oslo, Norway in August 1999. The problem it addresses is one that only becomes visible at scale: large engineering organizations spend enormous sums on specialist software licenses — CAD, simulation, reservoir modeling, EDA tools — where a single seat can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year, and they typically have no reliable measurement of who actually uses them. Renewal decisions get made on estimates and internal politics rather than evidence. Open iT meters real usage so those decisions can rest on fact. Fosli founded the company as its CTO after a decade as a systems engineer and consultant at Norsk Hydro and Equinor, and took over as CEO in 2015.

Career Highlights

• Founded Open iT in Oslo in August 1999 and has led it as CEO since September 2015, having served as its CTO for the first sixteen years.
• Built the company into a global provider with major offices in Houston, Oslo, and Lucena City, Philippines.
• Established a customer base across energy, engineering, aerospace, automotive, and semiconductor industries.
• Extended the product from on-premises software metering into cloud and SaaS usage tracking.
• Former consultant at Equinor and systems engineer at Norsk Hydro ASA.
• Holds an MSc from the University of Oslo.

Professional Journey

Fosli took an MSc at the University of Oslo and began his career in Norwegian industry, working as a systems engineer at Norsk Hydro ASA from 1990 to 1992, then as a senior consultant at Open Systems Consultants AS, and from 1994 to 1999 as a consultant at the oil and gas company now called Equinor. That decade placed him inside exactly the kind of organization his company would later serve: engineering-heavy, running expensive specialist software across large technical workforces, and spending accordingly.

He founded Open iT in August 1999 around a gap he had observed directly. Enterprises were buying software licenses in bulk without knowing how many were genuinely in use. A department might hold two hundred seats of an engineering application because that was the number bought three years earlier, with no visibility into whether eighty or one hundred and ninety were being used, whether usage was concentrated in a handful of power users, or whether licenses sat idle in one region while another queued for access. Vendors had little incentive to help them find out. The result was consistent overspending, occasional compliance exposure, and no factual basis for negotiation at renewal.

Open iT built software metering to supply that missing measurement — tracking real usage of licensed applications across an organization, identifying idle and duplicate entitlements, and giving license managers the data to right-size their estates and to negotiate from evidence. The value proposition was unusually easy to quantify, since savings appear directly in a renewal, which made the product a natural fit for industries with the heaviest engineering software spend: oil and gas, engineering and construction, aerospace, automotive, and semiconductors.

Fosli ran the company as its Chief Technology Officer for its first sixteen years, and became Chief Executive Officer in September 2015. Under his leadership Open iT has grown into a global operation with major offices in Houston, Oslo, and Lucena City in the Philippines, and has extended its coverage from traditional on-premises licensing into cloud and SaaS consumption as enterprise licensing models have shifted.

Education

University of Oslo

MSc