$200,000 — for Splunk partners specifically. That's new this year.

$200,000 — for Splunk partners specifically. That's new this year.

The 9th Annual Cisco Partner Innovation Challenge is open, and for the first time it includes the Cisco & Splunk Powering Digital Resilience Award: a dedicated $200K prize for solutions that bring Splunk's data foundation together with Cisco's networking, security, workspace and AI pillars to cut operational blind spots.

If you're a partner adding Splunk to your practice, this is the clearest signal yet of where the value sits — not Splunk on its own, but Splunk as the data layer that makes the rest of the Cisco platform observable, defensible and AI-ready.

The brief is refreshingly real: solve an actual customer problem and meaningfully change the economics, building as an extension of the platform rather than around it. It's a $1M challenge overall — but the Splunk-shaped opportunity is the one I'd be circling.

Dates for the calendar: - Submissions close Friday 4 September 2026 - Winners announced October 2026 at Cisco Partner Summit - Enter at https://lnkd.in/g2QJ9Bku

Read the announcement: https://lnkd.in/gsuTpyNB

To my Splunk partners — especially those just starting the journey — this is exactly what the community was built for. Pick a real blind spot, put the data foundation to work, and ship it.

The platform is yours. The $200K question: what will you build?

#CiscoPartner #Splunk #DigitalResilience #Observability #AI