Year after year, I’m struck by the sheer ingenuity our partner community brings to the Global Partner Innovation Challenge. Give brilliant engineers an open platform to solve real customer problems, they don’t just build integrations. They redefine what’s possible.
Today, I’m proud to announce that the 9th Annual Global Partner Innovation is officially open, with $1 Million USD in prizes on the table.
Our 2025 challenge alone drew a record-breaking 40% increase in submissions from 26 countries. Nobody held back, and last year’s winners made that clear: reaching students before mental health crises hit, converting wasted renewable energy into AI compute, diverting returned merchandise from landfills, and putting real-time patient intelligence in clinicians’ hands.
As the technology landscape shifts, so must we. Here’s what’s new for 2026:
This Year’s Value & Vision
Proving the technology works is just the minimum. We’re looking for solutions that go further, solving real customer problems that meaningfully change business economics.
The strongest submissions will show us partners acting as genuine extensions of the Cisco platform: building specialized applications on top of what we’ve shipped, and reaching customers in ways Cisco alone can’t.
This is also a skills moment. The partners pulling ahead in the AI era are evolving from traditional hardware integration to rebuilding how they develop software, with AI at the core of the work.
Simply put: show us solutions that accelerate customer success and make the entire Cisco ecosystem stronger.
The Cisco & Splunk Powering Digital Resilience Award
AI is now the expectation across every category — so rather than carve out a single AI award, we’re introducing something bigger: the $200,000 USD Cisco & Splunk Powering Digital Resilience Award.
Vulnerabilities and operational blind spots almost always live in the seams between disparate tools.
We want this award to recognize the partners closing them — with solutions that use Splunk as the data and telemetry foundation while integrating across Cisco’s pillars: Networking, Security, Workspace, and AI.
We’re looking for cross-architectural excellence: solutions that reduce tool sprawl, drive operational simplicity, and deliver the kind of resilient, observable outcomes customers can actually run their business on.
Partnering for Purpose
Technology is at its best when it’s pointed at our hardest shared problems. We’ve refreshed our Partnering for Purpose (P4P) awards to reflect where partners can drive real impact in 2026:
- Responsible Innovation: Purpose-driven AI and automation built on security, privacy, trust, and ethical design
- Community Resilience: Solutions that safeguard critical human needs and ensure continuity during humanitarian crises or societal disruption
- Energy & Sustainability: Innovations that reduce environmental impact, drive circular design, and leverage environmental intelligence
- Our People: Technology that fosters inclusion, supports wellbeing, and expands economic opportunity
Each P4P category carries a $25,000 USD award — $100,000 USD total across the four.
What Will You Build?
The partners winning in this market aren’t just reselling hardware. They’re acting as extensions of Cisco’s technology platform — writing software, building managed services, and solving problems customers will pay real money to make go away.
The full prize pool reflects that: a $250,000 USD Global Grand Prize, $100K for second place, $50K for third, $300K dedicated to our APJC regional winners ($50K per region), the $200K Cisco & Splunk Powering Digital Resilience Award, and $100K across our Partnering for Purpose categories — $1 Million USD in total.
Submissions are open now and close Friday, September 4, 2026. Winners will be announced at Cisco Partner Summit in October 2026.
The platform is yours. The $1 Million question: What will you build?
For more information on Cisco’s Partner Innovation Challenge and how to participate, visit Global Partner Engineering on SalesConnect. or start your submission now!
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