 Okay, welcome back. This is SiliconANGLE Wikibon's theCUBE live from San Francisco, Las Vegas, not San Francisco. Get in the end of the day, Dave. In San Francisco last week for Oracle Open World, but we are here live at the Splunk Conference in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm George, my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante. Hi, everybody. Matt Van Daveenter is here. He's with TradeMe, which is like the eBay. It is the eBay. Really, of New Zealand. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. We were talking off camera about the big race, you know, last week. In San Francisco. Condolences. I'm a Red Sox fan. If you know anything about baseball, you know, we've had our heart broken. So I'm sorry about that. Thank you. Thank you for your word. As I said, we're a nation in mourning. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about TradeMe. You were telling me off camera that essentially, eBay tried to get into SiliconANGLE, that essentially eBay tried to get into New Zealand. But you guys were there first. So let's go back. I mean, we're talking to the Halcyon days of the dot com bubble. And you guys made it through. So when did you guys get started? Tell us the story of TradeMe. So TradeMe was founded in 1999 by a young man called Sam Morgan, who was a consultant with Deloitte. And saw the opportunity. Started, executed very, very well. eBay came a couple of years later. Pretty half-heartedly, it's fair to say. And we already own the market. So they disappeared. And then Sam sold the company in 2006 to Fairfax Media, big Australian media conglomerate, for $750 million, which is a lot of money in New Zealand. A lot of money. Yes, a lot of money for it, I guess. And then a couple of years ago, we IPO'd. And so we're independent again, public listed company in New Zealand. Fantastic. Well, that's quite a story. I mean, so eBay actually probably started in the US before you guys launched. But when they tried to get into the market, maybe they felt like, OK, we own this thing. And what happened? Why were you able to win? So again, I think it comes down to good execution. So a locally owned and operated organization. New Zealanders like that. One of the famous quotes from Sam is, trade me's basically people buying things they've never seen from people they've never met. And so doing that on an American site doesn't feel quite right. So yeah, I think just really good execution. So is that local flavor? And then obviously some of the other things that are important in your business are the reputation of both the buyer and the seller. How do you guys deal with that? So we have a feedback system. And yeah, I mean, community is key. It's one of our core values is if we lose the trust of our members, then we've kind of lost everything. So we work really, really hard. We have about 30 people in our trust and safety team who all they do is protect our members, look out for the bad guys, ban those guys from the site, and then we have about 50 people in our customer service team who do the same thing. It's not an iPhone. One of the gold iPhones, the champagne ones were sold on eBay a couple of weeks ago for $10,000. What's the most bizarre thing you've ever seen that you can talk about sold on TradeMe? There are lots of weird and wonderful things. So the most viewed auction ever, I think it's certainly in the top three, was a scary washing machine. So this is a student who put an ad up just with really, really good humor of a washing machine that made a very scary noise. And it got, I think, like 3 million views sold for an insane amount of money. The other really, really big one was, I don't know if you guys heard a couple of years ago, we had a couple of really big earthquakes in Christchurch, pretty much decimated the city, and there was a boulder, you know, the size of a truck that landed in someone's living room, and they sold the boulder on TradeMe for, I think they got $25,000 for it. Really? Barely covered the cost of, but every little bit helps I guess. Exactly. So Matt, tell us about your infrastructure, maybe paint a picture for us and how it's evolved over the last 10 years or so. Yeah, sure, so we're a Microsoft shop, so we're a SQL server and .NET. We run our own data centers, we have a data center in Auckland and a data center in Wellington, and we run ActiveActive out of both of those. And we do, on a good day, we do about 70 million page impressions at about 15 million API calls, and we have about 700,000 people visiting the site on any given day. So we're pretty big in the New Zealand space. Pretty lean team, we have about 19 people in infrastructure, and then about 50 developers, and we deploy to production twice a day. About 40 to 50 changes go out onto the website every week. So yeah, we keep pretty busy. And you protect your data, you said it's an ActiveActive from the Auckland data center and the Wellington data center? Yeah, with the exception of our, we have three core master databases that are only live in one site at a time, and we move between Auckland and Wellington about four times a year just to make sure that we can actually do that. But all of our webs, all of our sort of read-only subscriber servers run ActiveActive out of both of those. OK, and so tell us how you're using Splunk. So I guess like a lot of people, the Splunk journey started for us with a syslog replacement. So we had a couple of syslog servers. We had a whole lot of very cumbersome and complex rules to alert people when bad things happened, and we decided that we needed to do something better. We jumped into Splunk. So that was a homegrown system? It was a homegrown system, yeah. Something that we rolled ourselves. And then, yeah, I guess like a lot of people, we just started seeing a lot of value. Being able to sort of correlate lots of really, really interesting events and get context around them as well. We just sort of jumped up to throwing our web logs in there, throwing all our image logs in there, and probably the biggest thing that we now do that's the most exciting for us is the DB Connect app, which talks directly to our production databases and what that enables us to do is give us context around, let's say a number that is in a web log, that's a listing ID, rather than that just being a hit. I know that that's someone looking at your house for sale in Auckland. And so being able to sort of provide that value to the business is where we're seeing incredible value. And that's why I'm very excited about Splunk 6 with being able to get our analysts actually helping themselves a little bit more than they do at the moment. Matt, one of the things that Dave and I talk about in the queue all the time is the collision between kind of old ways and new ways. And a lot of people are looking at Splunk right now getting really excited. People who have a huge active fan base in terms of customers. And obviously with the value proposition of Surge and Cloud and Enterprise, Splunk 6, it really is a nice analytics BI package as well. But it really is integrates kind of in the bowels of the data center, logs to apps, right? And everything in between which touches networks, touches servers, apps servers, all kinds of accelerators, all the converge infrastructure stuff that's going on that's being instrumented. So we know it's a nightmare. So I want to ask you, from your perspective, what is it about Splunk that people get so excited about? For the folks that are watching that might not know the ins and outs of Splunk, what are the people most jazzed about? And why is Splunk resonating so well with the people in the market today? I think for us it's the ease of being able to create the dashboards, the real-time searches. I mean we had one of our kind of big moments with Splunk was about a year ago we were having a bunch of image issues. So we have about 300 million live images on the site. We get about 7 images uploaded every second and we serve about 10,000 image requests a second. And we were seeing performance problems and we didn't know where in the stack they were if they were in the caching layer, the storage layer. We threw all of that data into Splunk. That's a hundred pack. I mean just go through files. Yeah, exactly. It was really really difficult and we threw all the logs into Splunk and in an hour we had a dashboard that pulled all of that stuff together and had all of the performance at every layer of the stack on a screen and the office that everyone could see. See all the expression, throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it, right? That's what you do with Splunk. You throw everything at it and it just eats it up and takes it in and just... And then it's the stuff that you didn't think you needed to know about, but then it's in Splunk and actually you do need to know about it. This is always a proposition of big data is that the value, the gold is in the data, right? So if you can unlock the data, that seems to be the common thread over the past two years. If you can unlock the data, that's the key. And how hard is it to get going? Give us the feel for what it's like to work with Splunk technology. For us it was actually really easy. I mean I'm lucky I've got a bunch of really smart guys and girls in the team and we just kind of took to it like ducks to water. So it was a really easy implementation for us. Probably the biggest challenge was was licensing. The more stuff you thrown at the water cost you. Did you make it some money with it? Exactly. You solve problems, just do a trade-off. Hey, cost to solve the problem. Easy sell to the business because we're getting so much value out of it on kind of every level. It improves itself pretty quickly. The ROI comes in. Absolutely. I mean not even on an operational level it's helped us prevent problems but now that we're delivering kind of business intelligence to the organization. At some point people will start squeezing on the budget with all this green field opportunity with the apps. I mean mobile's not going to be any issue either a clean sheet of paper with a mobile. You're going to have a lot of new people on mobile new exhaust with that too. Yeah, mobile's huge for us like it is for everyone. So 40% of all visits to our to trade me an hour on a mobile device and we expect that to overtake desktop. So 40% right now mobile penetration on your user base. 40%. How about the security side of it? So obviously Splunk has some security features. Can you speak about that at all? I mean has that relate to anything? Yeah, so we use it for security. I can't really go into too many details. Here's our blueprint. Please break our networks. But yeah, I mean we're the biggest website in New Zealand by some measure. So we have a pretty big target on our back. What kind of DDoS and what kind of attacks are you getting all the time? What's the level of security? Is it constant penetration? People attacking it? So DDoS, we had a really big one last year. The biggest one we've ever had. Which we were able to deal with quite effectively and Splunk helped us with that. The bigger thing for us is people trying to scam the site. Fishings, those kinds of things. People putting up fake listings, people overseas. Yeah, Craigslist has the same problem. So what's the future for you regarding the Splunk? I mean where do you see this going? As you look out on the stair, out in the landscape, going forward in the future, where do you see the business going from an infrastructure standpoint? Obviously mobile penetration is going to continue to grow. And apps are going to be going to proliferate. What's around the corner for Tacker and Splunk? So the two biggest things on the hit list for us are mobile obviously. But pure business intelligence. So being able to use the new tools in Splunk 6 and actually having, instead of my team doing all of that work, the analysts being able to actually drag and drop, create pivots, use the data models, use the analytics store. That's the really exciting problem. How much SQL do you guys have in there? So we have SQL Server. So we have a lot. So we use the DB Connect app. So we actually pull data out of SQL Server into Splunk to correlate with all of our other data. What you take on the whole SQL, no-SQL debate? Obviously Splunk's a great example. Amar al-Adha was just talking about unstructured data and SQL than Bala. I mean, is this, people are playing this issue, you know, SQL for Hadoop, SQL for this. I mean, does it matter anymore? I mean, what's your take on all this? Oh, it's an interesting one. I mean, I don't know if you saw, so Google have kind of announced their F1 relational database thing a couple of weeks ago. So they're going to go the other way now. I think everyone thought no-SQL was going to be, you know, all things to all people. Developers love it, you know, it's easy. It has its place. It's a no-market, you know. Yeah, I mean, we use Redis, but you're always going to need a transactional relational database. You guys use Redis? Yes, we do. You like Redis? Love Redis. Good queuing, managing real-time queuing. Yeah, we do too. We use it as well. Redis has been a big surprise for us, managing the real-time data. Yeah, we jumped into that last year. One of the things I just learned about that I didn't know about before I came here was that there's a Redis Splunk app. So you can actually talk to Redis directly and get some of that data out. Any Node.js on the mobile app at all? No? No. No. So we have an internal battle, native versus web, and I won't bore you with the details. No, I don't know. Always good to get under the hood. We love doing that on the queue. It's kind of like, you know, get in and play with the engine. Okay, so the final question for you is, what do you think about the conference here? I mean, is this your first time here? It's my first time at Splunk Conference. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing just being able to go around and talk to the guys who just know the stuff. It's pretty exciting. A lot of sessions I'm looking forward to. Do you think the Enterprise Cloud is going to be pretty interesting for folks out there? What's your take on that? It's not going to work for us. And that's... Well, you guys need a different package. Yeah, and also just, we have this thing that we call a tyranny of distance, which is there's one Internet cable that connects New Zealand to the rest of the world. So everything, you know, we need everything to be domestic because, you know, the faster our site is, the more money we make. And if we do stuff offshore and AWS or anywhere, latency is just too high. So we have to sort of consider those. So it's more of a business model issue as well. So what's the percentage of traffic outside the country? Oh, 2%. So you're all in country? Yeah, we're all in country, yeah. Okay. Dave, what do you think about the Splunk security thing? I mean, you heard from Amarawadal. You heard from the Department of Energy. What's your take on it? Well, you know, we've talked on theCUBE a lot, John, about security being a do-over. Given the amount of data growth, the new access patterns, cloud, virtualization, and I think, you know, tools like Splunk are part of the do-over. I don't know, Matt, how you feel about this, but, you know, security's changed a lot in the last, you know, 10 years. Even the last five years, the threat matrix has changed. The way in which the bad guys behave has changed. And so the whole, the back-end processes have had to change dramatically. So I gotta believe that Splunk helps compress the cycle and the speed at which you can respond and just identify threats. No, absolutely. I mean, it's an arms race, right? And for us, you know, the real-time search capabilities of Splunk, you know, really put us one step ahead. You know, I'm sure there'll be something coming around the corner that will, you know, have to change stuff, but that's just the way it is, you know. Anything that you want to see them do that would make your life better? No, no. Look, I'm a pretty happy customer, to be honest. It's a great product. Splunk 6, very excited about. Can't wait to get the upgrade. Have you downloaded it? Yeah, we were on the beta program, so we've been running it for a while, just not in production. Right. But yeah, looking forward to upgrading production now that it's released. Awesome. Well, great story. And, you know, wonderful entrepreneurial rise and a fantastic exit. Now, a public company. Trade me. Really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. Okay, we'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE live in Las Vegas for the Splunk conference. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, Extracting the Signature from the Noise. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.