As part of our ongoing support of the Australian and New Zealand partner community, last week we hosted the second annual Cisco Marketing Excellence partner awards. These awards are designed to recognise the great work that our partners are doing in creating and promoting innovative Cisco campaigns.

The awards are given across both the partner and distributor categories as well as recognising a partner in the Premier/Silver category which is a new award this year.

I am pleased to announce the following partners as this year's winners:

James Mackay from Express Data is the winner of the distributor category for developing creative marketing around the Cisco Front Row program. Gabrielle Kingston from Westcon was the runner up thanks to her innovative promotion of Cisco UCS.

In the partner category Logicalis' Oliver Descoeudres was the winner for developing an integrated program promoting "Tomorrow's Workplace". The runner-up was Garrett MacDonald who created a cloud campaign for Data#3 featuring Cisco's "Know the network" as a call to action.

For the new Premier/Silver partner category, Blair Burchill from Comscentre was judged the winner for a customer briefing he conducted with Cisco and a leading public sector customer.

All winners will enjoy a trip to Cannes, France in April next year to attend Cisco's global Partner-Velocity marketing conference.  Awards were presented by Sara Adams, managing director of the Cisco ANZ Partner Business Group, and you can take a look at our photo gallery of the winners and runners-up.

The awards were judged by a panel of executives and entries were ranked according to four key criteria. Firstly the nominees were ranked on their use of Cisco partnering marketing resources such as the Cisco Demand Centre and Partner Marketing Central. They were also judged to how closely their messages aligned to Cisco business priorities in terms of both architectures and messaging.

Candidates were evaluated heavily on creativity with partners being awarded for being innovative in both their approach and in the measurable output of the campaigns. Finally, judging also focused on Business Impact/ROI, with all winners showing clearly that their campaigns had a proven positive impact on their respective businesses.

Well done to all who were nominated for these awards and in particular to our three winners and runners up. Allez France!