This year’s Cisco Partner Summit 2025 was a powerful reminder of what’s possible when innovation meets purpose. Each year, as part of the summit, we host a Global Partner Innovation Challenge — an open invitation for our partners to bring their boldest ideas and innovations to leverage technology for good.
This year’s submissions in the Partnering for Purpose category reignited my passion for this work. The solutions our partners are building address some of today’s most pressing challenges across energy, healthcare, emergency response, and beyond. Together, we’re working toward our shared Purpose of Powering an Inclusive Future for All, one innovation at a time.
Purpose-driven innovation at scale
Year after year, our partners continue to raise the bar, and this year was no exception. Seventy-six of our 87 total submissions — an impressive 86% — fell under the Partnering for Purpose category. Additionally, 76 of the total submissions incorporated AI components, showing how partners are embracing emerging technology to maximize results and impact.
What stood out this year wasn’t just the quantity of submissions, but the ambition behind them.
It’s clear that our partners are thinking bigger, tackling problems at scale, and building solutions designed for real-world impact.
Among so many strong submissions, I’m excited to celebrate the four partners who exemplify the very best of purpose-driven innovation.
Get to know this year’s Partnering for Purpose winners
- KIW – This partner, based in Spain, is tackling two critical challenges at once with their Splid.AI platform: the growing demand for more computing power to run AI applications and the waste of renewable energy due to power grid limitations. KIW developed Splid.AI, an AI marketplace that turns excess renewable energy into computing power by connecting surplus energy producers with enterprises that need AI processing. Leveraging Cisco AI PODs, Splid.AI enables high-performance AI workloads to run exactly where and when renewable energy is available, helping to reduce costs and turn wasted energy into a valuable resource for AI advancement.
- Morgan Solar – This Canada-based partner is rethinking how buildings use and create energy. Morgan Solar’s Energy Blinds are photovoltaic window treatments that generate clean energy while keeping building occupants comfortable. Building owners report seeing real savings, with payback periods as short as two years. The blinds connect through Cisco Power over Ethernet (PoE) networks and use smart algorithms to adjust their position throughout the day, helping to reduce energy consumption from heating and cooling the room. They also collect valuable data about heat flow and occupancy that can be used for building management and AI applications.
- EchoStor Technologies – Addressing the critical challenge of clinician burnout and health care workflow inefficiency, this US-based partner developed Friendly Whisper, an AI-powered voice assistant platform built on Cisco technology. The solution integrates with existing hospital systems — electronic health records, labs, and monitoring devices — to deliver real-time, context-aware patient summaries through earpieces, headsets, or mobile apps. By turning existing hospital infrastructure into an intelligent voice assistant for clinicians, Friendly Whisper saves time, improves communication, and makes health care safer for both staff and patients.
- Iron Bow – When emergency systems don’t work together, response times suffer and lives are at risk. Iron Bow, also based in the U.S., built SignalPoint to fix this problem for organizations managing complex emergency response operations. The platform brings together Cisco technology and partner emergency platforms into one unified solution that keeps multiple systems in sync while ensuring compliance with laws and regulations. SignalPoint also provides advanced location services that can pinpoint 911 callers within five meters, giving first responders the accurate information they need to arrive on site quickly and save lives.
This year’s strong engagement in the Partnering for Purpose category reinforces a powerful truth that doing good and doing business aren’t competing priorities; they’re complementary forces that drive long-term business success.
To all our partners who participated in this year’s Global Partner Innovation Challenge: thank you. Your commitment to combining innovation with purpose reinforces what we already know — when we leverage technology for good, there’s no limit to what we can achieve.