The foundation of every great innovation is the confidence to be bold. For five years, Cisco has hosted the Partner Innovation Challenge, providing an exciting opportunity for partner teams, engineers, and developers to showcase how they are building great innovation on the Cisco platform -leading with an API-first mindset.

When we launched the Innovation Challenge in 2018, we focused on showcasing creators, strengthening partner services practices, and helping partners monetize solutions. Now five years later, we continue to learn from our partners just how far they can go with Cisco as a platform to create incredible solutions that help customers succeed.

Please help me congratulate this year's Partner Innovation Challenge and Bold Bets winners!

Winner: Velocis (India) -$200,000

Congratulations to our partner Velocis on taking this year's Partner Innovation Challenge top prize of$200,000. Increased demand on the modern network brings increased network complexity and is a major operational challenge. To address this problem, many IT Management Tools are working in silos to provide visibility and Root Cause Analysis across a domain. However, finding a Root Cause Analysis requires highly skilled resources across multiple domains and is like finding a needle in a haystack. Velocis BullsEye is a comprehensive Root Cause Analysis Engine that focusses on causes and not symptoms. Congratulations Velocis!

2nd Place: Raya Integration (Egypt) -$100,000

Raya Integration submitted a truly inspiring entry focused on Webex with live American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation. Raya's i-talk solution is an intelligent, instant and inclusive interpreter that supports humanity to overcome communication barriers in order to seamlessly get connected. i-talk facilitates the interpretation for sign and vocal languages who suffer with hearing and speech impairments through the power of emerging technology for a channel of autonomous communication. Integrating seamlessly with Cisco Webex to facilitate communication, i-talk provides an inclusive, reliable, and secure interpretation experience. This submission shows how technology can truly be a catalyst that improves not only the work experience, but also the lives of people who are doing the work. Well done Raya Integration.

3rd Place: CAE (UK) -$50,000

Congratulations to CAE for their DNA Assure submission, a cloud networking solution that fills the gap for outage risk management and business resilience. CAE's DNA Assure is an API-integrated managed service focused on the explosion in adoption and consumption of cloud services and cloud-based networking and the critical need for an assurance layer to mitigate risk. CAE's integrated solution provides continuous data protection and data management -delivering a Cloud BCDR best practice for Cisco Meraki -reducing business downtime and the restoration process from weeks to minutes!  Congratulations CAE.

And I'd like to highlightMasterSystem (Indonesia) with an Honorable Mentionfor their Sustainability Optimization application, which seeks to improve Service Provider sustainability in network operation. Sustainability will continue to be a focus for Cisco, and we look forward to working closely with our partners on even more innovation in this area.

Bold Bets Prize Winner: CDW (USA) -$200,000

In collaboration with Cisco's Emerging Technologies & Incubation group, we're delighted to introduce a new Bold Bets special prize. Bold Bets are ideas that stretch beyond our existing products to create new markets.

CDW's winning Bold Bet truly excited our team. Their Cisco Cloud Frontier is thehowof Hybrid Cloud - providing control over where and how Cloud resources are provisioned, with visibility, reporting, and remediation capabilities. Cisco Cloud Frontier drives thought leadership on cloud management and deployment and delivers cost savings and resource efficiencies for the Hybrid Cloud environment.

In working with Sanjeev Mervana, Cisco VP of Product Management, and his team in Emerging Technologies & Incubation on the integration of Bold Bets into our Partner Innovation Challenge, I've stretched my thinking on the role bold innovation plays at Cisco. We must always strive to solve challenges and find new and better ways to work with the power of technology, but it's also about being courageous and bold with big ideas. Sanjeev told me last year boldness is both a strategy and a characteristic. Our job is to ensure partners are confident in their skills and fearless in their innovation. With that combination, our partners are not just bold, but unstoppable.

Thank you to all of the teams that participated in this year's Partner Innovation Challenge with Bold Bets. We are already thinking about the 2023 challenge and look forward to sharing details with you soon.

Be sure you read the blog from the APJC team, which announced winners from their regional innovation challenge.

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