[ppog]

"Everything is contracted out to Datacom, Catalyst, Frondie, Solnet, etc. etc."

It's true that there's a big services sector, especially around government work. But there's also a lively startup/R&D scene. I worked 4 years for Mindscape (a dev tools startup, later to become Raygun), and then moved to GreenButton (HPC in the cloud, later acquired by Microsoft; the R&D team is still based in Wellington). Xero is a thriving, lively product company, although now large and mature; same with TradeMe. Weta Digital has a lot of in-house tech. And there are companies like 8i, just kicking off doing amazing things in motion capture and rendering.

So what you're saying is fair for "IT services" tech - if you want to do that, then yeah, Datacom is it. But there's so much more to the Wellington tech scene than IT services.