An important foundation for the successful collaboration on e-infrastructure in Norway is NRIS - a collaboration of five organisations to pool competencies, resources and services. The collaboration was until recently known as "the Metacenter".

NRIS consists of highly qualified IT staff at the four universities NTNU, the Universities of Bergen, Oslo and Tromsø and employees at Sigma2, counting almost 50 people.

The purpose is a geographically distributed competence network that ensures that all researchers who use the national e-infrastructure have quick and easy access to domain-specific support close to the user.