How a Fortune 500 pharma company solved meeting-room downtime at global scale.
One of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies had more than 1,200 managed meeting rooms across over 50 countries, and no single way to keep them running to one standard everywhere. Gambit's principal helped shape the program that solved it, then Gambit built the system that ran it.
The support existed. The wait was the problem.
A key meeting room at an important location failed at the hardware level. The manufacturer's support was real, and troubleshooting could be handled quickly by phone, but a hardware failure meant an on-site repair, and that process was slow. Between multiple visits and shipping, restoring a room could take four to six weeks. For a room people needed now, that was a long time to sit dark.
Part of the difficulty was structural. The company had moved off a single-vendor, all-in-one platform, where one manufacturer built the hardware and the software together, to the modern Microsoft Teams Rooms ecosystem. Better technology and more choice, but every room was now assembled from multiple manufacturers: the compute unit from one, the cameras, audio, and peripherals from others. Each of those brought its own warranty process and its own support desk.
So the real problem was never a single broken room. It was that keeping more than 1,200 rooms running across 50+ countries now meant juggling many vendors, many warranty paths, and no consistent standard for how fast any of it got resolved. What the company wanted was deceptively simple to say and hard to deliver: one place to turn, one standard, and the same SLA whether a room went down at headquarters or a regional office halfway around the world, without stitching together a different provider on every continent or holding spare inventory in-house for dozens of countries.
Decouple the swap from the repair.
Two things made the wait worse than it had to be. Most of these locations had no on-site IT, and the ones that did were staffed by conventional networking professionals who did not know how a Teams Rooms system was physically deployed or licensed on the back end. So even a simple hardware swap often had no one nearby who could do it, which fed straight into the slow warranty repair cycle.
The key realization was that a room does not need its own unit repaired. It needs a working unit, now. Separate those two things, keep swappable inventory close to the rooms, and let the manufacturer's warranty repair run its course in the background, and a four-to-six-week outage becomes a quick replacement. The room comes back in days; the paperwork on the failed unit happens on its own time.
Delivering that across more than 50 countries meant hardware had to sit within reach of the rooms and skilled hands had to be reachable fast, without stationing full teams everywhere. The shape was an inventory-backed service. The open questions were how to structure it, how to fund it, and how to make it something a large, standards-driven enterprise would actually adopt.
The engagement.
The work happened in two connected stages. First the program itself was defined and agreed with the client. Then the infrastructure to actually run it had to be built, and that is the stage Gambit was brought in to deliver.
Framing the problem with the client and designing a program they would adopt.
Gambit's principal owned this relationship and led it directly with the client's leadership, working with the operations team that owned the rooms alongside their procurement and legal functions. The role was a partner's, not a vendor pitching a fixed product: understand the real constraints, map them against what the delivery partner could genuinely support worldwide, and shape a solution that made sense to the client and could actually be delivered.
That produced a specific design. The client would prefund a strategically placed stock of critical components, compute units, cameras, microphones, owned by the client and held by the delivery partner within reach of the regions that needed them. When a room failed, the client could request hardware alone, if someone on-site could install it, or hardware plus a technician who would travel in to do it. Because the partner already ran offices and technicians across multiple continents, that reach was possible at a fraction of the cost of dispatching specialists from scratch each time.
The prefunded structure also made the commercial case work. Committing inventory up front let the partner price each service more competitively, recognized against the prefunded balance as it was drawn down, which made the program easier to justify than pure pay-as-you-go. From there, the full offering was framed and priced, the contract drafted end to end, and the terms negotiated through the procurement and legal team of a company many times the partner's size. The discipline was to keep it simple enough to put on paper and deliver consistently, yet complete enough to solve a genuinely fifty-country problem.
Turning a signed agreement into a system that runs.
An agreed program is not yet a working one. The partner had the technicians and the global footprint, but not the infrastructure to take in requests, route approvals, and track a live pool of client-owned inventory moving around the world. With the concept defined and funded but the delivery machinery still missing, Gambit was contracted to build it, and this stage was delivered wholly as a Gambit engagement.
We built a cobranded, password-protected web portal where the client could sign in and submit a request. Behind it, a custom intake form with conditional logic required the specific documentation each request needed, so nothing arrived incomplete. Submissions fed directly into the partner's CRM and routed notifications to the client-side approvers who owned the program, giving every request a controlled path from raised to authorized.
The heart of the build was inventory. We designed a module to track every unit through its full lifecycle: available, issued, shipped and to where, received back, repaired, or retired, with clear separation between client-owned and partner-owned stock. That separation carried real weight. When a technician replaced a unit on-site, they recovered the failed one, brought it back, and either repaired it or pursued a manufacturer warranty, and a restored unit returned to the client's pool. The system had to hold that entire reverse-logistics loop without ever losing track of what belonged to whom.
The result.
- A downed room restored in roughly 72 hours almost anywhere in the world, in place of a standard hardware-warranty cycle that could run four to six weeks
- 1,200+ managed meeting rooms across 50+ countries brought under a single, coherent support program
- A prefunded commercial model that lowered the cost of each service as it was drawn against the balance, making global coverage easier to justify than pay-as-you-go
- A controlled request-to-resolution path, from a cobranded portal through approval routing to inventory issue and reverse logistics, all running through one system
- A repeatable model, architected so the same program could be extended to other enterprises with minimal additional lift
The best solution fits the business, not just the problem.
A coverage gap has an obvious technical answer: put hardware and skilled people closer to the rooms. What made this program actually get adopted was designing it to fit how a large enterprise buys and operates, a global standard it could trust, a commercial structure that made the cost defensible, and a delivery experience simple enough to use from a site with no technical staff at all. The right solution had to respect the business, not only the broken room.
Getting there took both halves of the work: sitting with enterprise leadership to frame a genuinely complex, multi-country problem, and then building the system that turned the agreement into something that runs every day. A strategy that never ships stays a slide deck, and a system built without one just solves the wrong problem efficiently. The value was in doing both, which is the whole point of how Gambit works.
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