Utelogy helps the London Business Shool to deliver hybrid education

The platform of Utelogy has been selected by the business school London Business School to manage your AV equipment in the pandemic.

With a campus distributed in several buildings in the center of the capital of the United Kingdom, London Business School (Lbs) is one of the leading business schools in the world that every year hosts some 12.000 students and executives.

In this prestigious center are taught up to 120 up-to-date conferences in 140 teaching and meeting spaces, that requires a con-line audiovisual equipment, as they are regularly used more than 2.500 Devices, maintained by a team of only five people.

This intense activity also translates into constant pressure to ensure that everything is online and always working, as Wayne Buttigieg explains, LBS Infrastructure Manager; “the first classes are at 8:15H, and on the busy days five classes can start in one place and eight in another, and someone has to go through all those rooms to make sure everything is okay before that time.”.

However, the pandemic has changed the lbs's goals to get up and running quickly, for which you have installed the platform Utelogy to get much greater visibility of your AV equipment, of the way in which it is used and to know how it can evolve in the future.

"We have about thirty large teaching spaces, all equipped with AV hardware -explains Mario Vergara, IT teaching specialist at LBS-. Thanks to Utelogy we have automatic checks of the rooms scheduled to run at the 6 in the morning, before the IT customer service team's turn begins. This way they can identify the problems and go directly to the room, instead of checking every space from the beginning”.

As Wayne Buttigieg adds, “the deepening of the data will help us to better understand which rooms need which equipment and will allow us to direct our resources in a much more efficient way".

Saving time for LBS engineers and at the start of classes has been just one of the main advantages of the Utelogy system, which brings together a wide range of equipment in a series of quick reference dashboards, and that it is available in Spain through Avit Vision.

The school has invested heavily in state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment in recent years, so their list of teams is extensive: from visualizers Wolfvision Cynap up panels AMX and Crestron, screens of NEC Display and Iiyama, cameras Panasonic, Systems ship and much more.

Like other centers, during the pandemic, the London Business School has had to reorient much of this audiovisual heritage towards a new model of hybrid education, adapted to social distancing and off-campus students.

"We decided that the teaching would be in hybrid format, but we hadn't decided how," buttigieg recalls.. When the first live classes started, it was clear that a lot of things had to be done.. In terms of control, the Utelogy platform has allowed us to do this quickly and experiment”.

By establishing hybrid teaching, continues this responsible “we created several configurations and how we were able to create the user interfaces ourselves so quickly using U-Console and U-Control, we showed the rooms to faculty instead of waiting for a professional programmer and were able to quickly create a prototype with Utelogy”.

Another highlight has been “the integration that Utelogy has done with zoom, so that meeting room technology can be controlled, monitored and managed via a touchpad with the familiar Zoom Room interface configured with this platform”.

As a result,, users can control zoom room items, that include the conferencing codec, microphones, the camera and screen, as well as other devices in the room, such as lighting and occupancy sensors.

It's also changing the way the school's AV team works with new equipment. "You start to think about whether that manufacturer has a decent API., because if so we can give better support -underlines Buttigieg-. Now we even create custom controllers easily if needed.".

An example of this is the design of a button so that a teacher using Wolfvision Cynap can share content via Zoom in the school's new virtual classroom, as explained by this person in charge.

"This is a macro that regulates the functionality of the button and ensures that nothing unexpected happens, but the teacher loves it. This is exactly the kind of project we wouldn't have done in the past., since we can't justify paying a programmer to build something that only one person can use, but Utelogy allows it for free".

The Utelogy solution deployed at the London Business School is still relatively new, which means that there are some important areas of its functionality that have not yet been explored, how to get data and see precisely what is used and when in the different buildings of the school.

Other articles on AVIT Vision, London Business School, Utelogy