Case Study Executive Summary

Solution Overview

“Since the migration to ASP.NET we’ve seen a 10-15% reduction in CPU usage on web servers as well as significantly improved memory management, resulting in far fewer page faults. Together with a shift to Windows 2003 Web Edition around the same time, the migration has enabled us to reduce the number of web servers by 25% which means we can accommodate more growth on our existing platform.” Rowan Simpson Development Manager Trade Me Limited

Customer Profile
Trade Me Limited provides an online marketplace, attracting 2.6 million visitors per month. Established in 1999, the site grew quickly and is now responsible for serving 67% of all web pages viewed in New Zealand.

The company does not advertise and attributes its popularity to word of mouth and its relentless focus on usability.

Web Site
www.trademe.co.nz
www.findsomeone.co.nz
www.oldfriends.co.nz
www.safetrader.co.nz

Industry
E-Commerce
Software and Development

Customer Size
Medium

Scenario
Manageability
Reliability
Scalability

Business Situation
The Trade Me site has been a runaway success story and since it was first built it has been performing well.

However, as the site’s popularity grew, the Trade Me team realised that they would sooner or later need to refresh the underlying technology. This would enable them to attract the best technical staff and retain their existing team.

They also saw that there were technical benefits that a migration to Microsoft’s .NET platform would offer.

Solution Summary
Trade Me migrated all four of its websites (Trade Me, FindSomeone, Old Friends and SafeTrader) to Microsoft’s ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET.