Lockton Companies streamlines meeting rooms with Lightware & Cisco solution
Lockton, the world’s largest privately held insurance brokerage, recently undertook a sweeping modernization of its meeting room technology across its US offices.
Lockton, the world’s largest privately held insurance brokerage, recently undertook a sweeping modernization of its meeting room technology across its US offices. What began as a conference room upgrade initiative at the company’s Kansas City headquarters quickly grew into a nationwide effort to standardize and simplify meeting room AV systems. Lightware’s signal management solutions played a central role in this transformation, empowering Lockton to bring the design, configuration and control of its meeting spaces back in-house, without the reliance on external integrators.
Prior to the upgrade project, Lockton’s meeting rooms were built and maintained by third-party AV integrators. Many of the spaces were over-engineered yet underperforming, featuring racks filled with specialised equipment and custom control systems, with little standardisation across the nationwide offices. Not all rooms had videoconferencing capabilities, and those that did required significant technicalintervention to operate effectively. This was a drain on productivity and resources, as the IT teams were frequently dealing with requests related to malfunctioning meeting room tech.
The older rooms were extremely complicated. “They had so much equipment in the racks, the rooms weren’t easy to use, and we had a lot of issues. Beginning with our Kansas City HQ, we tore out the old gear and started fresh.
- explains Conor Loftus, IT lead at Lockton, a team member who was instrumental in leading the upgrade project.
The turning point came after the COVID-19 pandemic, which fundamentally changed expectations for how and where people collaborate, thanks to the rise in hybrid working. The team at Lockton recognised the need for a flexible and scalable meeting room technology standard. The goal was to enable seamless video conferencing in every meeting space, across every office.
The IT team began with a full overhaul of 10 rooms at their Kansas City headquarters. From there, they rolled out a standardized setup across their nationwide campuses, focusing especially on larger boardrooms and conference spaces. The new systems, based on the experience and technical expertise of the in-house IT team, were designed to be user-friendly and enable a plug-and-play experience.
All rooms are now centred around Cisco conferencing devices, such as Cisco Room Bar, Room Bar Pro or Room Kit EQ. Crucially, these devices are integrated with a Lightware MMX4x2-HT200 HDMI matrix switcher. Each room also includes an in-room PC connected to the Lightware device, with HDMI inputs available at the table and on walls for flexible content sharing.
The key to the system’s simplicity is a Cisco touch panel in each room, providing one-touch meeting join functionality. Thanks to Lightware, Lockton was able to eliminate the need for complex control systems and custom programming altogether, with the MMX bridging the gap between BYOD, meeting room peripherals and the company’s preferred Cisco-based collaboration tools.
We were able to eliminate the complicated control systems that needed custom code. Now, Lightware does everything we need control-wise, and it has been a huge hit with room users. Every room is consistent and easy to use.
- says Loftus.
Lockton’s introduction to Lightware came through its close relationship with Cisco, whose team recommended Lightware as an ideal AV partner for signal management. After attending a Lightware training at the Discovery Center in Las Vegas, Conor and his team quickly saw the potential of bringing system integration back in-house.
We took that knowledge, came back to Lockton, and implemented it ourselves. We were able to build our own rooms without an integrator, which has simplified everything.
- continues Loftus. A key benefit for the Lockton team is Lightware’s Cisco Room Configurator, a free online tool that streamlines system setup and makes it easy to visualize the entire AV workflow.
It’s almost like magic. The configurator builds everything for you, gives you a great map of how to hook everything up, and it’s directly integrated into Cisco. The file it gives out makes it so simple to build a conference room. Anyone could do this.
- says Loftus.
Another standout for Lockton has been the quality of support provided by the Lightware team. From quick response times to deep technical expertise, Lightware has become a trusted partner in Lockton’s AV journey.
Lightware has some of the best technical teams I’ve ever worked with. Their support team is great and gets back to me very quickly.
- confirms Loftus.
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Thanks to Lightware’s intuitive products, configuration tools and responsive support, Lockton has successfully standardized its meeting rooms nationwide, ensuring consistent user experience, simplified operations and complete in-house control over AV system design and deployment. What once required a team of external integrators and a rack full of custom-coded devices can now be achieved with just one or two pieces of Lightware and Cisco gear, managed entirely by Lockton’s internal IT team.
We’ve taken back control of our meeting rooms. Lightware gave us the tools and support we needed to own our rooms again, and now every Lockton Companies meeting space across the country works exactly the way we want it to.
- remarks Loftus.
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Lockton, the world’s largest privately held insurance brokerage, recently undertook a sweeping modernization of its meeting room technology across its US offices.
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Cisco Room devices provide high-quality, secure collaboration for hybrid workspaces. With Lightware technology, expand connectivity, boost control options, and use your Room Kit as a USB camera and speakerphone for seamless BYOM calls.
