Our next woman in VoIP came to know the industry through a family connection…her husband! Liz and Ari Rabban are a power VoIP couple, deeply involved in the industry since 1997.  Liz manages the marketing of Phone.com, handling all the promotion of their virtual office systems as well as VoIP for business and home.

How long have you been in VoIP world?

Officially for about a year, unofficially for the last 10 years…I am married to a VOIP pioneer who works around the clock from anywhere in the world, much of this time at home, so I have absorbed a tremendous amount of information about VOIP by osmosis, and he has brought me into certain projects over the years as a consultant.

What is it like working as a woman in the VoIP world?

It is interesting, because there are really so few in executive or technical positions that I have met to date.  I do not believe there is a traditional glass ceiling, but there just aren’t a lot of women in these roles yet, especially in the start-up ventures that presume working 24/7 is the only way to succeed (and they may be right) which can be more challenging for women, especially those with children. 

What are some of your networking/marketing methods?

Hmm, should I divulge my secrets?  I will say that in my current position we do not have unlimited budgets, so we are innovative in our approach to different target audiences, for example looking to local or regional professional associations for good opportunities to do outreach.

How is it working with men in VoIP?

Tell my husband it is FANTASTIC.  Tell the rest of the world that it is actually interesting to see the different perspectives that the men have.  They are certainly not monolithic, but as a rule are very methodical and will go through a much longer process than I would to get to a viable product or even to a marketing decision.  It can be both amusing and frustrating when I feel a beta or a product is good enough for at least a soft launch but the product guys will not release it.

What do you see for the future of women in VoIP?

I would love to see more female engineers, computer programmers, and designers as well as management.  They just bring something inherently different to the table.

Two words, Gas prices. I won’t comment on those two words, in the interest of keeping this brief. Around here we’re paying roughly $4.25/gallon for the cheap stuff. I also won’t get into the Global Warming debate. A little CO2 never hurt anybody, but hopefully we can all agree that 411,000,000 Metric Tons of CO2 probably will hurt somebody.

My daily commute to the office, round trip, equates to 65.2 miles. I also have a vehicle that offers respectable gas mileage, around 35 MPG on average. Based upon my round trip commute, and assuming 260 working days in a year, that equals an annual commute of 16,952 miles in aggregate. Even with a vehicle that is well above the national average in terms of fuel economy…according to http://thehousingforum.com/ I’m still pumping out 4.25 Metric Tons of CO2 for the year….which sounds like a lot to me.

CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) guidelines call for an average MPG of 27.5 and US census data shows an average commute for a US worker is around 33 miles. I still see a lot of tanks on the road, and that 27.5 MPG is a generous estimate, but let’s go with it. Again, assuming you don’t take a vacation and you work 260 days per year, the average US worker contributes 2.74 Metric Tons of CO2 each year.

This story has already pushed the envelope of my mathematics skills, and I was having a difficult time extrapolating the latest US Census Data in order to determine the number of full-time employed workers in the US. A ballpark average seems to be around 150,000,000.

Acknowledging some potentially flawed math, that would place the annualized CO2 output for full-time US workers at 411,000,000 Metric Tons of CO2. I’m having a hard time visualizing that, but it’s impressive, and not in a good way.

Back to my original topic. There has been a lot of talk recently about increased interest in telecommuting due to upward spiraling fuel costs. The need for seamless telecommuting capabilities is one of the strongest arguments for adopting VoIP in the workplace. Greg Galitzine at TMC penned one of many articles I have seen recently estolling the environmental virtues of VoIP and telecommuting. I can tuck the IP phone from my office under my arm, take it home and plug it into my network and function pretty much the same way I do when I am in the office….actually I probably get more work done at home.

I don’t think we are going to see a 4 day workweek anytime soon, but 1 day per week of telecommuting is a step in the right direction. If US workers were to telecommute only 1 day per week, based on my crappy math, that’s an extra 82,200,000 Metric Tons of CO2 we save. Again…tough to visualize if you don’t know what CO2 looks like….but the average car weights around 1 Metric Ton. I’ll be working out of my home office tomorrow if you need me.