Ten years designing the operational layer that restaurants actually need.
My background is ten years of hospitality IT. Most of it spent running a Syrve dealer operation — implementations across the Baltics, Germany, and adjacent EU markets. Over a hundred projects, three countries of active work, deep inside POS and ERP deployment at every scale.
That decade taught me something specific: the real operational gaps in restaurants aren't where the vendor playbook tells you to look. They sit between systems — in procurement, in food cost reconciliation, in supplier communications, in the handover between POS, ERP and accounting. Closing those gaps is architectural work. It's what I do now.
ITHS is the form that practice takes today — independent, hands-on, product-backed. I configure systems myself, write product specifications myself, sit in audit sessions with operators myself. It's deliberate. Architecture stays honest when the architect is the one delivering it.
The shape of the practice — from first dealer role to independent ITHS and NEXX.
Ten years inside Syrve and similar platforms taught me what not to repeat. The POS, as a category, works. But restaurants kept hitting the same wall anyway: more systems, more data, harder to navigate. You train staff for months on one interface, they grit their teeth through the pain until the pain stops — and then they fear anything new. Skepticism becomes the default. Architecture becomes rigid because changing it hurts.
Somewhere between project fifty and project a hundred, it became obvious: the problem isn't that the POS is bad. The problem is that the layer around the POS is wrong. No vendor was building a stack that assembled like Lego — modules that clip into each other without code, without weeks of migration, without retraining the team every time a new tool arrives.
Everything I do now is a response to that. Digital Architecture Audits, KPI Audits, AI agents — these validate what operators actually need, not what vendors guess they need. NEXX, RestoAudit, ITHS Gate — these are the modular pieces that clip into an existing ERP and POS without asking them to change.
That's the bet: if you design the layer above the POS as composable from day one, restaurants stop being hostages to the one tool they bought in year one. They gain the ability to evolve without re-architecting.
Architecture and hiring are the same job: finding the best, and teaching them to work together.
I heard Jack Ma say something similar later. By that point ITHS was already running this way — in how I build the team, and in how I wire third-party products into a client's stack. It's one job, two domains.
Every engagement — from a 30-minute audit to a multi-location rollout — follows the same shape. The steps force honesty at each stage.
The consulting side — Digital Architecture Audit, KPI Audit, custom AI agents — is how I stay hands-on with operator reality. It funds the work and validates what operators actually need, as opposed to what vendors guess they need.
The product side — NEXX Ecosystem, RestoAudit.ai, ITHS Gate — is how those answers scale beyond one client at a time. Every product came from a problem I'd seen repeat across dozens of restaurants.
Both sides are deliberately architecture-first and POS-agnostic. They work with Syrve, CompuCash, r_keeper, iiko — or any established platform. They don't replace the POS; they close the gaps around it.
A few boundaries that make the practice work. These come from the last decade of running deals — learning where flexibility helps and where it quietly destroys the work.
The best way to know whether we can help is the Digital Architecture Audit. 30 minutes, free, and you leave with a written diagnostic you can use — with us or without us.