Kafka is used as a "dial tone for data" to ingest large amounts of data at HomeAway. An experiment using Kafka and Camus to ingest over 1TB of data per day from various systems and applications was successful. It allowed for various use cases like SLA reporting, fraud detection, search and clickstream analysis, and traveler segmentation. Key lessons included the importance of the schema registry for decoupling producers and consumers, and making stream processing easy through tools like Samza. The presentation concludes that Kafka allows building systems of engagement and intelligence on top of ingested data.