Do meeting rooms spoil the in-office experience? Logitech and its simplified Rally Bar 2 aim to fix that

In-office meeting rooms leave a lot to be desired in terms of experience. Improving that won’t just make life better for your employees, one company has claimed, it may even directly lead to positive business outcomes.

That was the main message from Logi Work 2026 in London, where VP and GM Henry Lovak talked more about its own solution to the problem, the recently released Rally Bar 2.

As most office workers will tell you, the spaces we use for hybrid meetings and video conferencing are complex environments. While there will be some organizations that have made bad decisions, in most cases it isn’t really the fault of IT decision-makers or the business as a whole – it’s the sheer complexity and depth of choice that causes the issue.

Much like a home, a meeting room will be a collection of products bought over time. Unless everything was shrewdly purchased from one vendor in one go and the room specifically designed for the purpose of holding hybrid meetings, it’s likely there’s a mixture of different vendor hardware and software all cobbled together. Some of it works fine but parts of it need upgrading and there’s always a difference in experience between those in the office and those at home.

This can affect office morale and productivity, according to Logitech’s own research: while 89% of employees believe a good workplace experience directly affects business outcomes, only 27% feel they have the necessary setup in the office.

“It’s a broad view of the overall IT landscape, not just specific to video,” Lovak told ITPro after his keynote. “But I think most people would agree that when the office works well – that’s everything from the social elements to collaboration, the whole spectrum of collaboration – you get better outcomes from your team.”

When any of those in-office essentials break, that creates a problem, according to Lovak – and these aren’t the only problems he believes need solving.

“There’s still more to do around space reservation and space management,” Lovak explained. “Wayfinding, I feel like it still hasn’t been completely solved in a lot of offices. So I think from a broad spectrum of tools, IT managers and AV leaders would say there are still areas and pockets where there is still an opportunity for innovations… in some ways, that’s what we’re doing with Rally Bar 2; that’s what our announcement was saying. A lot of what people love about Logitech and meeting room experiences in small, medium, and large rooms are coming to much larger rooms. So hopefully we can bring that number (27%) up a little bit. So that people feel that outcomes are high and they have more solutions and spaces that they really want.”

The simplification of Rally Bar 2

Announced a week before Logi Work, the Rally Bar 2 and the Meeting Room System are Logitech’s answer to overly complex video conferencing setups. The second generation of the Rally Bar is a simplification itself, incorporating the original Rally Bar and the Rally Mini into one piece of kit.

“We looked at both and thought about the feedback. What is the feedback we’ve gotten over the years? What is it that people love? And simplicity is also about fewer options,” Lovak said. “As long as you can still satisfy different use cases. Having a long menu of options and things to consider is complex. So we always try to distill things down to their core essentials and what we find is that the technology today is actually quite capable of doing both things really well in one device.”

The original Rally Bar is a good example of this. Logitech used an optical camera system as it was keen to prove that Android devices could exist in much larger rooms than they were originally designed for.

Lovak argued that they had achieved that pretty well, however they also wanted a wide field of view for certain rooms that just needed the different angles. Technically, it was unrealistic to do an optical camera without the wide view they wanted, Lovack admitted, as the camera solution would be quite large.

With new technology, like bigger sensors, better ISP, and faster processing, though, Logitech was able to do wide camera angles and still get that nice in-room zoom.

“Now the technology has sort of caught up; it allows us to simplify even the product catalogue, so instead of having two options, you have one option,” Lovak said. “And that one option is even better than the two because it satisfies both use cases.”

The Logitech Rally Bar 2 is available now with prices starting at £3,899.