The world’s largest cybersecurity firm, Palo Alto Networks, has already signed on as a partner.

A second tech giant is set to be announced within weeks, according to Robertson and the firm’s country manager. Others will follow, from AI and other tech sectors.

All going to plan, Otago University’s three-pronged Queenstown push will see:

Otago pro vice-chancellor Professor Richard Barker relocated to Queenstown last week, where he’s taken up a new role overseeing the university’s new beachhead.

“Richard is now here permanently as our establishment lead for what is called UoQ, which is University of Otago, Queenstown,” Robertson said.

The Otago University-Palo Alto Networks partnership, and the second deal expected to follow, were brokered by Technology Queenstown, a non-profit formed in the wake of the town’s Covid lockdown slump. The university is a founding member of the group, along with One NZ, Genesis, NZX and others, while the council and airport are capital members.

Barker said the Big Tech deals were all “non-financial”, with the companies chipping in resources like software, time, mentorship and expertise.

The Bachelor of Entrepreneurship will shift to Queenstown as an articulated programme, Barker says, with students starting in the ski town then finishing at Otago’s main campus. The new masters programme in technology is still undergoing final approvals.

While some of Queenstown’s infrastructure is already busting at the seams, Barker says, “The students can help solve problems in the area around energy, clean energy, and building a 21st-century city.”

Otago University already owns a four-hectare property at Woolshed Bay, donated by Remarkables Station owners Jillian and Dick Jardine in 2016 for a research retreat.

Pandemic wake-up call

Technology Queenstown chairman Roger Sharp – a veteran tech entrepreneur and deal-maker, now resident in Queenstown – was charged by then Mayor Jim Boult with exploring ways to diversify the local economy.

After travelling to the US, Sharp found two ski towns that had smoothed over their boom-bust cycles by developing tech hubs: Bend, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado the state that has attracted several Kiwi firms, including Xero, Parkable and Halter, who all have outposts there for the southwest US market.)

Sharp says Queenstown is naturally poised to take a similar path, given the number of local and international tech figures who have settled in the area.

Some, like the rarely present Peter Thiel, have focused on property. Others, like Xero founder Sir Rod Drury, are all-go on local initiatives.

The “Tech Masters” event run last Friday at Millbrook as an offshoot of the NZ Open, illustrated that Queenstown is already a natural gathering point for tech.

Around 100 attendees included tech industry people from around the country, but also locals like Mike Hamer – a software engineer for Nvidia’s autonomous vehicle unit who remote works from Queenstown and Tribe co-founder Edwin Darlow.

The scale of the opportunity

The tech sector currently provides around 1.5% of Queenstown’s GDP, versus the national average of 7.5%.

Lifting tech’s contribution to the national average – split across the tech sector and tech roles in general industries – would add an estimated 3000 jobs and between $650m to $1.3 billion per year to the local economy, according to modelling by Technology Queenstown member Accenture.

In 20 years, Otago University and Technology Queenstown sees a potential 8400 tech-related jobs in the area. Sharp says he’s keenly aware it needs to be done without adding to current infrastructure pressures.

“I did a tour of mountain towns in the US to learn how they’d done it. We [Technology Queenstown] built a picture of what you need to do to build a proper tech economy, to diversify an economy like Queenstown, and it starts with education, bringing in universities and teaching tech.”

Travel, hospitality focus

“We’ve got discussions going with many companies about what we can do together. And we’ve settled on travel tech and hospitality tech as the cluster we want to build,” Sharp says.

“In economic terms, we’ve learned that if you try to build an industry cluster in the wasteland or in a desert with nothing around it by itself, you’re unlikely to be successful. But if you focus on an adjacency where there’s critical mass, you’re more likely to succeed.”

At Tech Masters, Drury raised bookings as an area of travel tech to focus on. He said around $1 billion per year was leaking to multinational online travel agents (OTAs), who currently had around 30% market share.

The OTAs often paid late and kept data close, with NZ travel operators not even knowing which country a guest was from until the last minute.

“They want to own the relationship,” Drury said.

He saw potential for the situation to get worse, and fast as agentic AI took hold.

“If you look at any of the big AI company demos, travel is their number one thing,” Drury said.

“This is a major risk for a small economy like New Zealand.”

Drury said the answer was for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) to broker a single site listing all NZ travel operators, underpinned by a sovereign AI – that is, a homegrown large language model made by New Zealanders for New Zealanders, in the vein of Australia’s Matilda.

Drury painted a picture of local control of the “data layer” around bookings, with a single “NewZealand.com” platform, local operators negotiating power and letting them learn something about our visitors.

The gang’s all here

Technology Queenstown trustees include Kiwi tech entrepreneur Claudia Batten; Neil Jacobstein, who chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University but has also been heavily involved in Queenstown’s nascent tech scene; and Dino Vendetti, who has been visiting the area since 2019 under an Edmund Hillary Fellowship entrepreneur visa.

Vendetti was formerly a partner with Vulcan Ventures, the investment firm set up by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Ellen.

More recently, he’s been involved in building the Bend, Oregon tech ecosystem (the Wall Street Journal recently put Bend at number six on a top 10 list of cities with the most “cutting edge skills” for tech).

Meanwhile, US venture capital legend Frank Quattrone, 70 – dubbed the “Prince of Silicon Valley” during the dot-com boom when he led IPOs for Amazon, Cisco and Netscape – is a trustee of the NZ Open Charitable Trust that each year raises about $500,000 to help communities in Central Otago.

The annual tournament’s model, devised by the late Sir Michael Hill, sees business people pay to play along with the pros, in the name of philanthropy. Last week, Briscoe boss Rod Duke and Zuru co-founder Nick Mowbray took to the course. Quattrone set up residence near Auckland’s Tara Iti Golf Club last year.

“Our partnership with the University of Otago is designed to bridge the gap between academic theory and real-world defence,” said Misti Landtroop, NZ country manager for Palo Alto Networks (recently in the news after it won a Crown contract to supply network security to all 2542 public schools through to 2031).

“We see a massive opportunity for students to engage directly with industry leaders. This isn’t just about guest lectures; it’s about creating a pipeline from the classroom to the front lines of global cybersecurity.”

Silicon Valley internships were on the cards for students.

“We are committed to finding and nurturing the next generation of Kiwi tech talent right here in Otago,” Landtroop said.

At Tech Masters in Queenstown, Otago University’s Robertson told the Herald, “Dunedin will always be home. But you can imagine a time, as the urban area grows, when this will be a very large campus.”

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.