Matt van Deventer, Head of Development at Trade Me, discussed his business, considered the “eBay of New Zealand”, and its use of Splunk, with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at Splunk .conf 2013.

Trade Me was founded in 1999 by Sam Morgan, a former consultant with Deloitte. It was sold it in 2006 for $750 million and filed for an IPO two years ago, becoming a public company, van Deventer explained.

Discussing eBay’s failed attempt to enter the market and Trade Me’s success, van Deventer said “it comes down to good execution,” and the fact the company was a locally owned and operated organization.

Asked about their approach at managing reputation for buyers  and seller, van Deventer said Trade Me had a feedback system, a team designated to handle users who need to be banned, plus 50 people in the customer service team that also deal with the issues at hand.

Listing the most bizarre things sold on Trade Me, van Deventer mentioned a scary washing machine sold by a student who scored a record 3 million views, and a boulder the size of a truck that landed in someone’s living room (in the Cristchurch earthquake of 2011) that eventually sold for 25,000 NZD.

Why Splunk?

Discussing the Trade Me infrastructure, van Deventer mentioned they were using two data centers in Auckland and Wellington. The website gets 70 million page impressions per day, 700,000 visitors and a team of 50 developers.

“Our Splunk journey started with a sys log replacement,” van Deventer said. “We started seeing a lot of value, being able to correlate, get context.”

Asked what made Splunk a great choice, van Deventer said, “I think for us is the ease of being able to create the dashboards, the searches. For us it was really easy to work with Splunk. We just kind of took to it, it was a really easy implementation for us. We’re getting so much value out of it. It’s helped us prevent problems, but we are now delivering business intelligence with it.” He added, “the real time search capabilities really put us a step ahead. I am a pretty happy customer to be honest.”

Asked about the security issues they were facing, van Deventer said it was less about DDOS, and more about people trying to scam inside the system – phishing, fake listings, etc.

The two future big things in their collaboration with Splunk, van Deventer said, were mobile (40 percent of site users are mobile users), and pure BI, being able to use the new Splunk tools.