Mazévo is UTD’s newest reservation program of choice, officially overturning the EMS Reservation System for student clubs and faculty organizations as of June 30.
The Reservations Office recommends that student organization leaders and faculty begin making their fall semester reservations before the start of school Aug. 21 Designated room schedulers will need to open a Mazévo account using their NET ID at utdunion.mymazevo.com to reserve rooms. At the beginning of each semester, student organizations will submit three designated room schedulers to the Student Organization Center, the same as before with EMS. However, these schedulers will no longer be required to complete a room reservation training.
Representing the Greek word for “gather,” Mazévo is one of the latest software in the reservation system industry. It’s intended to be a more modern reservation tool aimed towards supporting higher education and nonprofits, claiming better user interface and accessibility compared to its competition. Mazévo is mobile friendly, has a smoother user interface, and is not a downloadable software, but instead an automatically-updating cloud software. EMS has not been majorly updated since 2014.
For a brief history of the Mazévo system and its founders, see utdmercury.com
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Mazévo is UTD’s newest reservation program of choice, officially overturning the EMS Reservation System for student clubs and faculty organizations as of June 30.
The Reservations Office recommends that student organization leaders and faculty begin making their fall semester reservations before the start of school Aug. 21. Designated room schedulers will need to open a Mazévo account using their NET ID at utdunion.mymazevo.com to reserve rooms. At the beginning of each semester, student organizations will submit three designated room schedulers to the Student Organization Center, the same as before with EMS. However, these schedulers will no longer be required to complete a room reservation training.
Representing the Greek word for “gather,” Mazévo is one of the latest software in the reservation system industry. It’s intended to be a more modern reservation tool aimed towards supporting higher education and nonprofits, claiming better user interface and accessibility compared to its competition. Mazévo is mobile friendly, has a smoother user interface, and is not a downloadable software, but instead an automatically-updating cloud software. EMS has not been majorly updated since 2014.
Officially launched in 2019, the story of Mazévo goes as far back as EMS Systems. In 1986, Dean Evans and Associates developed EMS Software before launching the initial iteration of EMS Systems with EMS Enterprise in 1999. By 2014, EMS Systems had acquired over 2.5 million customers, and founder Dean Evans decided it was time to sell the company.
UTD was one of the many customers still using EMS Systems by the time it was purchased by its current owners at Accurent. However, since 2014, Bryan Peck — co-founder of both EMS Systems and Mazévo, currently acting as Mazévo’s vice president ofsales and marketing — noted that the rapidlychanging industry had opened a need in the market for something up to date.
“If you just look at the product, it really hasn’t changed much since the day we were there. And yet the industry overall has changed a lot, and people now expect things to be more user friendly,” Peck said. “There was a lot of innovation happening, a lot of changes, but [EMS Systems] was just the same old as when we left. We started talking together and we’re like, , it might be kind of fun to get back into this and create something brandnew.”
In 2019, Peck and Evans founded Mazévo as a cloud-native solution accessible online, rather than as an overwhelming software package. Unlike EMS Reservations, Mazévo was now mobile friendly and easier to update. For EMS reservation system users at UTD, the system was only accessible online through a website portal that wouldn’t support mobile-first indexing or touchscreen navigation configurations.
It took nearly an entire year before Mazévo saw its first customer according to Peck, but from there the company took off by building a reputation on responsive customer service and transparency. Peck credits this to the eight-person team that manages Mazévo, each previously experienced with EMS Systems in some way.
“We are a small company, and that’s actually by design. With EMS, when we left there, we probably had somewhere around 100 employees at that point. We’ve grown a lot and everything, but this time around we’re like, you know what? Let’s keep it small on purpose, because there are certain things a small company can do better than any bigger company,” Peck said. “Even Dean Evans, who’s our CEO, is very involved in the day-to-day operations. He’s doing support tickets, he’s involved with the product and what features go in there. Because we’re all so close to the customer base, we’re having those conversations.”