Celebrating the Winners of Cisco’s 2026 Partner Innovation Challenge

What does it take to move an AI idea into the work a customer does every day? This year’s Partner Innovation Challenge winners have some practical answers. Different problems, different industries, but a common focus: making AI more useful and dependable in real operating environments.

Today, I’m proud to congratulate the 2026 winners and take a closer look at what they’ve built.

Global Winners

1st Place | 2026 Cisco Innovation Partner of the Year ($250K USD): Presidio

• The problem: AI agents can recommend a payment, approve a claim, or grant access. Who checks that the action fits the business’s rules before it happens, and who steps in when it doesn’t?
• The solution: ActionGuard, Presidio’s answer at the point of execution. It evaluates each proposed action against business policy, then allows it, blocks it, or holds it for human review. Decisions can be logged to Splunk.
• Why it matters: Unlike safeguards focused on an agent’s identity or whether its content is safe, ActionGuard focuses on the business risk of the specific action at the moment it is about to happen. Logged decisions give security and risk teams a record to monitor and use to refine policy coverage and calibration.

2nd Place ($100K USD): CDW

• The problem: Event networks have to be designed, deployed, and kept running on tight timelines, often for short-lived setups that still need to work reliably.
• The solution: Valkyrie Event Orchestration, a proposal that connects those steps in one AI-assisted workflow. It describes the event network in words or sketch it, and AI agents turn that input into a design. A digital twin lets the team test the design before deployment, and the agents can support operations during the live event.
• Why it matters: By linking design, pre-deployment testing, and live-event operations, Valkyrie is intended to help teams move from event requirements to a network they can operate on a tight timeline.

3rd Place ($50K USD): Orange Business

• The problem: When network, application, infrastructure, user-experience, and security data sit in separate tools, teams can struggle to connect symptoms and find where an issue began.
• The solution: CheckPulse, a managed observability service built on Splunk and integrated with Cisco technologies. It brings network, infrastructure, application, user-experience, and security signals into one view. Built on Splunk and integrated with Cisco technologies, it’s designed to help customers see more of what is happening across their environment.
• Why it matters: With these signals in one managed service, teams can connect symptoms and find where an issue began. The next step would extend CheckPulse from bringing signals together toward helping teams act on what they reveal.

Cisco + Splunk Powering Digital Resilience ($200K USD): Denali Advanced Integration

• The problem: Oversized cartons ship extra air, while poor packing can leave fragile items damaged. At a busy fulfillment bench, workers have to make those decisions quickly, often by eye.
• The solution: Pack Bench of the Future brings measurement, AI, and a 3D packing solver together to guide each order. A depth camera measures the items, AI identifies care needs such as fragility, and a 3D packing solver recommends the smallest carton that can safely fit the order, along with a sequence for placing the items. Inference stays on premises, so customer order imagery stays at the site, and Splunk records activity at the bench.
• Why it matters: Teams can monitor packing decisions across their operation. The result is a workflow designed to help workers pack with less guesswork and more consistency.

Partnering for Purpose Winners

These four $25K USD awards recognize partners applying innovation to challenges facing people and communities.

APJC Regional Winners

Across APJC, six partners earned regional awards of $50K USD each for proposals built around specific needs in their markets.

What This Means for Partners

Adding AI is table stakes. The hard part is making it useful in a customer’s day-to-day work. That’s the opportunity for partners: understanding the decision a customer needs to make, the information they need to make it, and where the right checks belong.

Congratulations to this year’s winners, and thank you to every partner who submitted an idea. I’m looking forward to seeing where you take them next.

For more information on the Global Partner Innovation Challenge and how to participate in next year’s competition, visit Cisco’s Global Partner Engineering on SalesConnect.

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