(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Interop (News - Alert) 2010. To view TMCnet’s entire library of videos from Interop and other industry shows, demonstrations and interviews in our in-house studio, visit our Video News home page.)

Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC’s (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to speak with Andy Gottlieb, founder and CEO of Talari Networks (News - Alert).

Gottlieb said the company’s been doing well – mentioning that in a recession, saving money suddenly gets a lot more attractive: “On the one hand, people are willing to be more aggressive in using our technology.” He explained that Talari’s technology can be added to an existing MPLS network, what he calls “MPLS augmentation,” or actually replace the MPLS itself.

He’s seen a couple customers trying to install a hybrid, keeping some MPLS in their core data centers, but to actually eliminate their MPLS and really save money, Gottlieb says, Talari would “pay for itself in 6 to 10 months.”

So when you find customers whose MPLS contracts are about to expire, he says, they’re the ones who most readily see the Talari value proposition, and save money on their private WAN “without sacrificing reliability.”

Tehrani asked about the necessity for MPLS augmentation in such a scenario. Gottlieb replied that some of their customers simply needed more bandwidth, where their alternatives have been to pay more to the carrier, but “nobody’s budget’s going up twenty percent a year.” For companies that bought into bandwidth two or three years ago, “we’re a great answer for ‘what do I do next for my network?’”

While the cost savings are clearly the driver in “getting people over the finish line,” Gottlieb said, “what’s going on with virtualization and cloud computing with the network, is a number of interesting challenges, but fundamentally it’s service centralization to the nth degree.”