Late last month we discussed Vidyo’s steps toward commercializing web conferencing by bringing their technology to university campuses, and recently PGi announced a partnership with AVI-SPL that will meet a similar goal. AVI-SPL is proud of its status as a global integrator of audio visual systems and services, and through this new partnership their customers can access PGi’s audio, web, and event- collaboration services.

PGi’s collaboration with AVI-SPL isn’t necessarily bringing video conferencing to the masses the way companies like Vidyo and ViVu are, but it will make the technology more prevalent. PGi’s CTO, David Guthrie, noted that “video is top of mind with our customers and speeds up decision making in a more competitive business climate.” Guthrie has a point—the economic downturn meant budget cuts that largely abolished travel disbursements and left video conferencing nothing but room to grow in the enterprise. A large number of companies discovered during this period that video conferencing was possibly always the better solution to meetings and collaboration, and now it’s becoming necessary to survival.

An indication of how mandatory video conferencing is for survival is that PGi’s customers’ requests are the driving force behind this new partnership—a customer list that includes 90% of the Fortune 500. Of course, many large enterprises already have video conferencing systems, but PGi and AVI-SPL—like so many other conferencing solutions providers these days—want to create a program that’s accessible and doesn’t mean users have to wrap their heads around multiple technologies. It’ll be interesting to see what these two churn out, and how their competitors in enterprise respond.