The London Business School (LBS), considered one of the world’s leading business schools, is host to about 12,000 students and executives each year. Up to 120 lectures a day take place at the school, which is spread across 140 teaching and meeting spaces in several buildings in the heart of London, including the new Sammy Ofer Centre. The result is an impressive AV estate--more than 2,500 devices are in regular use at the school and maintained by a crew of just five AV support staff.
As a fee-paying school that has taught some of the brightest business minds of recent decades, there is constant pressure to ensure that everything is online and working all the time. “The first lectures start at 8:15 a.m.," said Wayne Buttigieg, head of infrastructure, London Business School. "And on busier days you may have five lectures starting on one site, eight starting on another—and someone has to get around to all of those lecture theatres just to make sure that everything is okay before 8:15 a.m.”
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Two significant events during 2020 moved the goalposts at LBS. First, the COVID-19 pandemic saw the school shift to a new methods of hybrid learning. Second, LBS installed the Utelogy platform to gain dramatically improved visibility into its AV estate, how it is being utilized, and how it can evolve in the future. The flexible Utelogy platform can run on any network and server, virtual or otherwise, and can integrate with teaching spaces, smart classrooms, and hybrid learning environments.
“In May we decided, as a school, that teaching would be in a hybrid format, but hadn’t decided in what form,” recalled Buttigieg. “In setting up hybrid teaching we created several configurations—and because we were able to come up with user interfaces very quickly on our own, using U-Console and U-Control, we were able to demonstrate the rooms to the faculty. That was really useful; instead of waiting for a professional programmer, an AMX or Crestron programmer and pay for that work to be done, we could just rapidly prototype them ourselves with Utelogy. As the process was interactive, the speed to concept was invaluable.”
This constant adaptability is one of the real benefits LBS takes from its Utelogy installation. “We made quite a few tweaks from what we were originally proposing with hybrid learning,” said Buttigieg. “Having a tool that allows you to do that on the fly was invaluable.”
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Saving time for LBS engineers and reducing the time to lecture start have also been key benefits of the Utelogy system, which unites a wide range of equipment under a series of quick reference dashboards. "We have something like 30 large teaching spaces, between lecture theatres and classrooms, as well as many student rooms, and they are all equipped with AV hardware,” explained Mario Vergara, teaching specialist, IT, London Business School. “Using Utelogy software, we have been able to setup automatic room checks that are scheduled to run at 6 a.m. daily, just before the morning shift begins for the IT Customer Services team. They're able to identify issues and go straight to the room that has that issue instead of checking every room from scratch. In the current COVID-19 environment, we have reduced coverage of engineers, so this efficiency is all the more pertinent.”
The Utelogy system at LBS is still relatively new, so there are some significant areas of its functionality that is yet to be explored. Part of that involves data and seeing precisely what is being used when over the school’s diverse estate.
“Utilization data will be very useful, especially for the group rooms,” offered Buttigieg. “I often pass by a room which has some amazing equipment in it to find someone just sitting in there tapping away at a laptop that isn’t connected to anything. Digging into the data will help us understand better what rooms need what equipment in them and enable us to target our resources in a much more efficient manner.”
Utelogy's integration with Zoom provides added functionality for lecturers, but the platform is also changing the way the AV team can personalize other AV equipment. For example, the IT team designed a button for a lecturer using WolfVision Cynap to share content via Zoom side-by-side in the school’s new virtual classroom.
“It’s just a macro that governs the functionality of the button and ensures nothing unexpected happens, and she loves it," said Buttigieg. "That is exactly the sort of project we would not have been able to do in the past, as we can’t justify paying a programmer to build something that may only ever be used by one person. Utelogy effectively gives us experimentation for free. We want to harness Utelogy further, with more custom interfaces for experimentation, more automation for checks and healing, and ultimately use the data to make real ROI decisions.”
