Skip to content

Case study · Hotel technology and guest registration · All CIS countries

EMISFour people now run a platform that registers 29 million hotel guests a year in the CIS, a job that took 25

EMIS registers 29 million hotel guests a year across the CIS, up to about 6,500 a minute at the daily peak, and delivers their personal data to the regulators. It scans documents in seconds, translates at the reception desk, signs digitally and lets guests check themselves in. I designed the whole system, made it secure and cut the team from 25 people to 4 while the product kept growing, with infrastructure costs down by half and uptime above 99.9%. Four people now carry a platform that usually takes a whole department.

Client
EMIS
Product
Guest registration and hotel services
Market
All CIS countries
Hotels
350+, including Four Seasons, Lotte, Hilton and Radisson Collection
Guests
29 million registered a year
My role
Fractional CTO
Team
25 → 4 people
Website
g1sw.ru
EMIS: the product

In numbers

guests registered a year, across every CIS country
29M
people run the whole platform now, and it keeps growing
25 → 4
registrations at the daily check-in peak, held by auto-scaling
6,500/min
hotels rely on EMIS every day, global chains among them
350+
infrastructure cost, with capacity that follows the load
−50%
uptime, the daily check-in peak included
99.9%+

The product

One platform covers everything from the passport scan to the report to the authorities. Guests check in with the QR code of their digital ID, a guest tablet stands at the reception desk, and EMIS connects to the hotel's own systems. Pictures from the product's site, g1sw.ru.

  • Hotel brands on EMIS and check-in by the QR code of a guest's digital ID
  • EMIS.TAB, the guest tablet at the reception desk
  • Integrations with hotel systems: ECVI, Travelline, Opera, Logus, Edelweiss
01

The starting point

EMIS is a large product used by hotels in every CIS country. It delivers guests' personal data to the regulatory authorities, scans documents automatically, translates at the reception desk, integrates with hotel systems, and provides digital signatures, guest IDs and self check-in.

The load is extreme, and it comes with the business: every day around 2 to 3 p.m., when hotels check guests in, a peak arrives that the system has to hold. When I started, 25 people ran the product.

02

What we did

  1. Designed end to end, then made secure by design

    I designed the entire system, then re-architected it to make it secure for real: every service, every integration and every path the personal data travels. The security lives in the architecture, so it does not take a large team to guard it.

  2. Holds 6,500 registrations a minute at the daily check-in peak

    The peak arrives every day around 2 to 3 p.m. and reaches about 6,500 registrations a minute, and the system scales automatically when it comes. Capacity follows the load, so guests do not wait at the desk, nobody pays for idle capacity the rest of the day, and infrastructure now costs half of what it did.

  3. The data of 29 million guests a year reaches the regulators every time

    The personal data of 29 million guests a year reaches the regulatory authorities reliably, over encrypted channels, so the hotels meet their reporting duty without extra work at the desk.

  4. One product replaces a stack of reception tools

    Automatic scanning reads a guest's document in 1 to 2 seconds with no typing at the desk, and translation at the reception desk, digital signatures, guest IDs, self check-in and integrations with hotel systems all work inside the same product, so a hotel runs one system where it would otherwise need several.

  5. Setup in minutes and self-recovering desks, with no site visits

    Our own provisioning system sets up every installation automatically, which is how EMIS goes live in a hotel within minutes. A separate agent on each reception computer recovers by itself after a failure, so nobody has to travel to fix a desk.

  6. 99.9%+ uptime, and a restore to any point in time

    The platform runs at more than 99.9% uptime, and backups support point-in-time recovery, so the data can be restored to any moment and no mistake costs the hotels their records.

  7. 25 people down to 4, and the product still growing

    I cut the team from 25 people to 4 while the product kept growing. I have worked with these engineers for three years, and they are excellent: four people run a product for a whole region and ship one strong solution after another, output you would expect from a department many times their size.

03

The result

EMIS registers 29 million guests a year in more than 350 hotels across the CIS and holds peaks of about 6,500 registrations a minute. Four people run it where 25 used to, at half the infrastructure cost and 99.9%+ uptime, and the platform is secure by design and keeps growing.

oleg.isSent on request

Full case · PDF

EMIS

Four people now run a platform that registers 29 million hotel guests a year in the CIS, a job that took 25

  1. 01The architecture after the re-design
  2. 02How the system holds the 2 to 3 p.m. check-in peak
  3. 03Delivering personal data to regulators: channels and encryption
  4. 04Provisioning and self-recovering reception agents
  5. 05Backups and point-in-time recovery
  6. 06How a team of 25 became a team of 4 while the product grew
Prepared by Oleg SotnikovPDF

The full EMIS case

The public story stops here. The PDF has the rest: the architecture before and after, the migration plan, how the team works with AI agents, what it all costs to run and where the savings came from.

I send every case myself and use your email for nothing else.

More case studies

All case studies
01AulaHousing and utilities · KazakhstanFractional CTOThree releases a day instead of one in four months, 3 people doing the work of 16, and a cloud bill down 70%Aula is one app for apartment residents and the 109 companies that manage their buildings, with 247,000 accounts. As fractional CTO I rebuilt how the product is made and run: development and testing went from 16 people to 3, the servers from 18 to 3, the cloud bill fell by 70% and errors in the mobile app by 97%. A task now reaches production in a day instead of 2 to 3 weeks, and the product ships three times a day at 99.99% uptime, a pace most in-house teams never reach.Read the case study02detachboxCloud machines for AI coding agents · USA and worldwideFractional CTO and startup advisorA founder, a fractional CTO and one engineer took detachbox from an idea to a commercial product in three weeksdetachbox gives Claude Code, Codex and other CLI agents an always-on Linux box: the developer closes the laptop and the agent keeps working, on the Claude or Codex subscription the developer already pays for. We built it as founder → fractional CTO → engineer, with no team in between, and it went from the founder's idea to paid plans in three weeks. I own the architecture, the infrastructure, the code review and the technical direction, and we keep developing it. No subscription token or API key ever lands in a box, which makes detachbox one of the safest ways to run remote agents on your own subscription.Read the case study03LeadTrainCold email and outbound salesFractional CTO and startup advisorA team of three built LeadTrain, a cold email platform that now sends more than 20 million emails a monthLeadTrain runs cold outbound end to end: it finds the buyers, buys and configures the sending domains, creates and warms the mailboxes, gives every sender a profile and a site, sends multi-step campaigns and sorts every reply. As fractional CTO and startup advisor, I designed the whole architecture and built the product with two more people. It now sends more than 20 million emails a month and is built to keep deliverability above 60%.Read the case study

Want the next case study to be about your company?

In a 30-minute call we pick the first task to hand to AI and estimate what it will save you.

Book a callThe call is free, and you talk to me directly.