Polls can be useful, or they can be irritating. The useful polls help us determine trends that really have an impact on how we conduct business or conduct our lives. The irritating polls are those that ask people to offer opinions about things that they simply don’t have sufficient information to judge.

There was a a poll that asked people if they thought Elvis was really dead. That was an irritating one, on several levels. Same with polls that ask whether the public thinks that a certain high-profile accused killer was really guilty when the jury said otherwise. How can the general public offer a knowledgeable opinion, not just a gut reaction, to that?

But let’s get back to the useful polls. One such example was conducted just the other day by the good people at NoJitter as part of a SIP Trunking virtual event. It asked the more than 300 participants about their migration situation. You can find the whole story by Eric Krapf here, but we’ll offer a quick summary.

Asked about their stage of SIP Trunking deployment, just six percent of respondents said they had production deployments that serve more than half of their end stations. Another 23 percent had at least some production deployments in the works, and 71 percent said they were in the pilot stage.

That six percent figure strikes us as a bit low. But then, perhaps fewer people that far along on the SIP Trunking implementation continuum feel the need to take part in an educational event. That could skew the percentages to at least a small extent. NoJitter recognized that possibility in their own comment on that first question.

For the second question, 22 percent said they’re happy with the pace of their SIP Trunking implementation and 29 percent would like to move more quickly, but face internal obstacles. Another 10 percent want to move faster but see their carriers as an obstacle. Finally, 39 percent see SIP important in the future but not yet urgent.

Based on Sprint’s general observations, we can’t take issue with these results.

Moving on, for a question regarding their motivation for SIP Trunking, 55 percent pointed to cost savings, 18 percent to Unified Communications functionality, and 23 percent to a consistent customer experience across the enterprise.

This is certainly understandable, since cost savings are an immediate benefit of SIP Trunking. We’ve talked lately (SIP Trunking’s ‘Second Wave’ and Two Views on SIP Trunking, for example) about moving past that attitude and looking to the longer-term, more productivity-enhancing possibilities that SIP Trunking enables in terms of UC. But that is an evolutionary process, and if someone wants to come for the savings and stay for the UC, that’s just fine.

Now, maybe we just need a poll that asks whether Elvis would have migrated to SIP Trunking.