Most hotel managers treat their telecommunications systems like the plumbing or the electricity, just another utility that must be maintained and serviced. But Daniel Prosser wants to change that. 

Through the business he founded thirteen years ago, Prosser aims to show the hospitality industry that with the right amount of tweaking, a premier telecommunications system can be one of the best investments a hotel can make. 

In advising hotels, Telman Technology Partners Inc. reviews a property's trunk line configuration, call accounting systems, local exchange carrier, long distance and operator service providers, pay phone and Internet systems, then shows hotel executives the best design to support guests, optimize employee efficiency and increase profitability. 

Last June, Telman signed a partnership agreement with Promus Hotel Corp., a Memphis-based hotel company that merged with Doubletree Hotels Corp. early in 1998 to create the lodging industry's third largest revenue producer with more than 1200 hotels, 122,000 rooms and 40,000 employees. The merger prompted Promus, whose chains include the Hampton and Embassy chains, to seek a vendor who could bring them cost-effective and enhanced hotel telecommunications services, says Prosser. 

The agreement was a large leap in the hospitality industry and a big boost for Prosser's company which has doubled in size the last two years. 

"No company has gone out and outsourced all of its telecommunication services in the industry," he says. "We invented the concept of outsourced telecommunications management. I think our background and innovation set us apart." 

Other Telman clients include California-based Sunstone Hotel properties, Memphis, Tenn.-based Wright Investment properties and Noble Hotels out of Atlanta. 

"We typically don't have a lot of business in our own backyard. There are not a lot of hotel management companies locally," he says. 

Prosser founded Telman in 1986 after a stint managing the telecommunications division of a Minnesota corporation. Coming out of the early 1980s, and watching the break up of Ma Bell, Prosser began to notice that businesses needed help making decisions on telecommunications as the industry moved from one that was highly regulated to unregulated. 

"Business management people, whatever their environment, suddenly had to make decisions about telecommunications that the telephone company was previously making for them," he says. "I saw that as an opportunity and took the idea and ran with it." 

After a move to Houston, Prosser helped the San Luis Hotel in Galveston revamp its telephone system. Figuring that the hospitality business was the largest service industry in the country and that telecommunications the largest technology investment a hotel will make, Prosser narrowed the field to concentrate his business solely on hotel properties. 

While telecommunications is still the central part of its business, Telman has branched out into software design by marketing a program that helps managers plan and measure performance in a hotel. 

He says hotels usually purchase a phone line system, and over time additional services are added and misaligned with existing ones. Systems are often reprogrammed and patched together, diminishing effectiveness. 

And while Prosser says he can provide physical dimensions of a system, compounding the problem is that "people are not prepared with the strategic aspects of technology." 

To tackle that problem, Prosser approached the University of Houston Conrad Hilton School of Hotel Management about creating a technology center to educate students starting out in the hospitality industry. In 1995 he co-founded the Technology Research and Education Center at the college, where he also serves on the board of directors. 

Inevitably, he says, as hotels cater more to business travelers, their role as technology providers will go beyond providing a fax machine and a plug for a modem. 

"Hotels have been focused primarily on expanding and being developed," he says. "I think the industry will begin to turn its attention to how well those facilities support the traveler, particularly the business traveler." 

He says in the not too distant future, hotel technology will allow the business traveler to operate as effectively on road as in the office. They'll be able to work as though they were still in the office. 

"I think our company will go in that direction and be strongly involved in that concept."