Most problems with enterprise meeting rooms come from AV and IT teams not coordinating effectively enough. This article discusses AV/IT convergence means in practice: shared standards, defined ownership and a lifecycle approach to managing hardware, starting from deployment to replacement.
AV used to consist of standalone displays, dedicated cabling, systems that lived apart from the corporate network. Not anymore. These days AV sits on the same infrastructure IT already runs, cloud platforms, centralised management, the cybersecurity policies and APIs that cover everything else in the building, plus a growing layer of AI-driven capabilities on top. A fault in one domain doesn’t stay contained to that domain anymore.
AV-over-IP, Dante and similar IP-based transport standards have been moving audio and video onto standard network infrastructure for the better part of a decade. What has changed, however, is its scale: nearly every device in a modern meeting room now depends on the same IP and Ethernet standards that IT teams have run for years. There are simply more of these devices, in more rooms, doing more.
What convergence actually means
AV teams cover acoustics, room behaviour, signal chains and the physical experience of a space. IT teams cover networking, identity, security policy and infrastructure at scale. But both teams now collaborate extensively for the modern meeting rooms to function.
In practice, there is a shared architecture: common network standards, common security policies, common monitoring tools and clearly defined ownership of duties.
What convergence actually means
In the past, meeting room troubleshooting was simple. When people using a meeting room faced a problem, one or few among them would bend down under the table to search for the HDMI cable or a suitable plug point and somehow fix the problem. If they couldn’t do it on their own, they would call for support and someone would come in and take care of the issue. That is no longer how it works.
Take, for example, a dropped audio call. When the meeting room participants call for support, the AV team checks devices, cables and connections and finds nothing wrong. The fault turns out to be a network issue. It could be a port authentication failure, an expired certificate, or a misconfigured VLAN. None of this is visible to the AV team and none of it is monitored by IT unless AV hardware is explicitly on their radar. The ticket bounces between departments while each side works out whether the problem is theirs to fix.
If you consider such problems across dozens of rooms, this becomes hours wasted on deciding who is responsible for the problem rather than fixing them, as neither of the teams have end-to-end visibility across both the AV estate and the network it runs on.
- Shared monitoring needs to cover AV and network layers together instead of as separate dashboards.
- Faults need pre-decided owners attached before they happen, so that it does not have to be worked out during the incident.
- Device health visibility is also another important factor to consider.
- Firmware and software updates need a schedule instead of accumulating until something forces the issue.
- An escalation path needs to be decided upon, so teams do not have to negotiate whose ticket it is while a meeting suffers.
To enable these, the support model needs to be designed as if AV devices are similar to IT-managed endpoints.
Lifecycle management, not just support
The lifecycle of a networked AV device looks like the lifecycle of any other IT asset: deployment, configuration, monitoring, firmware and software updates, troubleshooting and eventually, replacement. Treating AV hardware as a one-time installation rather than an asset with an ongoing lifecycle is bound to cause problems.
Room devices should be provisioned to a standard, rather than configured individually by whoever’s on site that day. A monitoring platform needs to be watching for a failing camera or an unresponsive processor, ideally before anyone walks into the meeting where it becomes a problem. Firmware updates run on a schedule, not left to pile up until a device turns into a security liability by default. And replacement, when a device finally reaches end of life, follows the same standard the room was originally built to. It shouldn’t turn into its own redesign project.
Designing for this lifecycle from the outset, rather than retrofitting it after a room is already live, is the difference between a footprint that scales cleanly across new offices and one that needs a bespoke fix every time something changes.
Managing security devices
Get access policy, certificate management and patching sorted at the design stage. AV and IT need to agree on this together and agree on it before the room goes live. Otherwise you find out the hard way, usually when a device gets quarantined off the network mid-project because nobody flagged it earlier.
Who owns the data the room collects
Rooms built without shared architecture tend to work fine at first. The gaps only show up later: unmonitored hardware, inconsistent security configurations across sites and no single view of what is actually deployed where.
A security audit, a platform migration or a move to workplace analytics then turns into a room-by-room remediation exercise instead of a straightforward rollout.
Building the shared architecture in from the start avoids all of this. It gives you meeting rooms that are easier to secure, easier to manage and easier to scale as the office footprint grows.
At Actis, we design AV systems, from single huddle rooms to full workplace estates, on architecture built for this from day one. If you’re planning a new deployment or want to review how your current rooms are managed, get in touch with us today.
Neither team should own the whole thing. AV owns what happens inside the room, the displays, audio, cameras, acoustics. IT owns the network underneath it. The failure mode isn’t unclear ownership within each domain, it’s nobody having a combined view of what’s actually deployed across both.
Uptime, firmware versions, certificate expiry, authentication events and anything odd in bandwidth or latency on AV traffic. Same list as any other network device, really.
No. They need to work together. What has to change is the layer underneath the two teams, shared standards, shared monitoring and an agreed decision on who checks what first.
Like any other endpoint on the network. Access policies, a patching schedule that actually gets followed, certificate management and a spot in the same security review process everything else goes through. The mistake is exempting AV hardware from this because it doesn’t look like a normal endpoint.
At design, before anyone’s ordered hardware. VLAN structure, authentication, security policy, all of it needs settling before installation. Bring IT in afterwards and you’re usually redoing work that would’ve taken an hour to get right the first time.
This one needs answering before the analytics get switched on, not after. IT will end up managing the access and storage side of it regardless, but retention periods, consent and who’s allowed to actually view transcripts or usage data are calls that need legal and HR at the table, not just a network configuration decision.