NTT DATA’s MRaaS spans design, support and recycling across the room lifecycle

Aon's offices in Brazil can now handle three times as many videoconferences as they could before a two-year modernization with NTT DATA. Client meetings rose 50% over the same project. Those are the headline figures in NTT DATA's case study, and the company's November 2 blog post on Meeting Room as a Service (MRaaS) cites the project. MRaaS brings design, deployment, monitoring, support and technology refresh into a coordinated lifecycle.

The pitch comes in a blog post by Matthieu de Montrion, NTT DATA's Digital Workplace Go-to-Market Director for Europe. It's worth a close read for anyone who owns a room estate across several offices. The post starts from a familiar problem in global organizations: one region chooses one vendor, another makes a different choice, and years later the organization is left managing the combined result.

Nine stages, one supplier

De Montrion sets out the scope of MRaaS. It starts with design and standardization, moves through procurement and installation, and continues with monitoring and managed support. It also handles technology refresh and asset lifecycle management, and at the end of a room's life, decommissioning and recycling. The post notes that these stages, from room design and procurement to deployment, support and technology refresh, tend to be handled as separate activities. Facilities and IT teams fund their investments separately, and local AV integrators bring in their own technologies and standards.

He's frank about how that drift happens. One region chooses one vendor, another region chooses a different one, a provider that performs well in one market struggles in the next, and local integrators bring their own standards. Years later the organization is managing the combined result. For an employee, that means a different interface and room layout in every office. For the people running the estate, it means a pile of support contracts and no single view of what works.

According to NTT DATA, the model also affects financial planning. Organizations do not have to depend solely on periodic capital spending each time a major technology refresh comes due. They can shift toward operational costs that are more predictable and map out technology lifecycles over time. Bringing requirements together across countries and regions can also simplify procurement and cut the administrative burden of buying locally. The post adds its own condition: the number of rooms, the service levels required and the pace of deployment all shape the economics, and it recommends realistic volume commitments and a phased rollout.

De Montrion argues that as audiovisual equipment shifts further toward IP, meeting rooms rely more heavily on the network, on cybersecurity and on the broader IT environment. In his view, choices about collaboration technology can no longer be made apart from the infrastructure that supports it.

Inside Aon's Brazil rollout

Aon, the professional services firm that operates in more than 120 countries, started with a familiar problem. As hybrid work and remote client calls grew, its Brazilian offices were running several videoconferencing platforms on infrastructure that limited meeting efficiency for both staff and clients. NTT DATA's case study lists four workstreams: standardizing the videoconferencing platforms, upgrading equipment and reconfiguring meeting rooms, deploying technology that works with multiple collaboration platforms, and adding monitoring tools for visibility into system performance.

The results are worth reading closely. Tripled capacity and more hybrid-equipped rooms clearly needed hardware. A standardized experience across offices, which the case study also reports, comes from deciding what every room should look like and holding to it.

UC Today's Ultimate Guide to Devices and Workspace Tech 2026, by Sophie Wilson, argues that consistency across rooms and locations matters more than standout showcase spaces, because predictable experiences drive adoption. It also says audio remains the number one driver of meeting quality. For IT and workplace leaders, the guide says, modern solutions must support simple deployment, remote management at scale and actionable workplace analytics.

The limit of the evidence is simple: this is a vendor-published case study that reports outcomes but not costs, so it shows what's achievable, not what it costs to get there.

The broken room nobody reports

The sharpest observation in NTT DATA's post is about how room failures actually surface. When a room fails, people tend to pick up their laptops and move rather than file a ticket, so the service desk is often the last place a broken room shows up. Support then becomes reactive by default. MRaaS answers this with centralized monitoring, so recurring faults show up in data before the next meeting hits them.

Utilization has the same blind spot. In a video on the VOSS Solutions website, Keith Bareham, a product manager at VOSS Solutions, walks through a dashboard for a meeting room that "kind of peaks at around twenty five percent capacity." He notes that the room usually holds a single person, and sometimes two. His booking analysis also shows long stretches when people were inside the room even though nobody had reserved it. Bareham concludes that the space mostly works as a drop-in workspace instead of the meeting room it was built to be. The same dashboard flags no-shows, where a room was booked and nobody arrived. None of that would reach a help desk, because nothing is broken.

That variation could cut both ways for a single global standard. Where hybrid work levels differ by region, one room template rolled out everywhere could over-equip some offices and under-equip others. A phased rollout, which the post itself recommends, could let usage data from early sites inform the standard before it's locked in.

The strongest counterpoint is that visibility can be bought on its own. VOSS sells monitoring, analytics and bulk provisioning as software that sits across rooms from multiple vendors, with no handover of the lifecycle. Arvia, a Malaysian AV integrator, describes booking systems with check-in rules that release a room automatically if nobody arrives within a set window, and warns that a window that's too short frustrates teams running late from a previous meeting. For a company whose main problem is not knowing how rooms get used, that layer may be enough. A full lifecycle contract makes more sense where the real cost sits in procurement sprawl across countries and integrators.

Questions to put to a provider

NTT DATA's own caveats on economics give buyers a starting point. Room count, service levels and deployment pace decide whether the model pays off, so those are the terms to negotiate first. Arvia adds a small but telling detail from its deployments: rooms need consistent names across panels, calendars, signage and internal maps, or a system that works technically still confuses the people using it. A lifecycle provider that owns design should own that naming standard too.

The data question matters more than it first appears. De Montrion argues that combining room performance with occupancy, energy and space-planning data can tell workplace teams where capacity is short, which spaces sit empty, and where refresh money should go. That's only useful if the data flows back to the company in a form it can use. If it stays inside a provider's dashboard, the company has outsourced its view of the office along with the hardware.

Workplace and IT leaders whose rooms were bought country by country, through different local integrators, are the ones likely to feel this first. A single-site company with one integrator and one platform has less to consolidate. For a multinational that already runs several conferencing platforms, the Aon project, which started from multiple videoconferencing platforms and standardized them, could be a useful reference point when asking providers for comparable results.