About The Winter Ball featuring the 2026 Impact Awards
Building on a decade of celebrating excellence through the Impact Awards, the Winter Ball marks the first standalone evolution of the event, transforming recognition into an immersive industry celebration.
On August 13th, the evening will bring partners, vendors and distributors together for a night to celebrate the channels projects and people in true style.
The 2026 techpartner.news Impact Awards celebrate Australian IT and digital partners, distributors & marketplaces, vendors and people that achieved meaningful impact in the 2025 calendar year.
This year, we are excited to expand the awards, with seven categories recognising people - from heads of business, sales, and marketing to emerging leaders, technical specialists and community leaders.
That's in addition to 10 awards recognising partner businesses - from customer experience partners, to data partners, infrastructure, networking, security, managed services and others.
Winners will be announced at the Winter Ball in Sydney in an evening featuring live music, a charity auction, and a curated guest list of channel leaders
Why enter the Impact Awards?
- The Impact Awards are an opportunity to show your business or someone in it has achieved real-world, meaningful impact.
- All finalists and winners will be announced via the techpartner.news website, email newsletter and social channels seen by many thousands of readers.
- Winning projects, companies and people will be featured in stories shared with thousands of readers of our website, email newsletter and social channels (you can use these articles as testimonials/media clippings).
- Winners will be revealed on August 13, 2026 at the gala techpartner.news Winter Ball in Sydney.
- All winners and finalists will receive a brand pack containing the awards logo to use on their website and marketing.
- We may also recognise a Highly Commended or Commended in each category.
What are the Partner Award Categories?
Partner Project Awards:
- Customer Experience Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner projects that helped end-user customers with customer experience. This could include website, ecommerce and call centre projects, for example.
- Employee Experience Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner projects that made their staff, or their customer's staff, more productive. This includes projects that involved devices, office equipment, collaboration tools, and scheduling/HR systems, for example.
- Social / Environmental Impact Award: recognising Australian partner projects that have contributed to positive social or environmental outcomes. This includes philanthropy, environmental sustainability projects, and other tech-for-good projects, for example.
- Infrastructure Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner projects that helped customers with IT infrastructure, include compute, storage, cloud, converged systems, and data centres, for example.
- Networking Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner projects that helped customers with networking. This includes network infrastructure projects involving SD-WAN, WiFi, and switching, and telecommunications projects, for example.
- Data Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner projects that helped customers with data. This includes data platform modernisation, data cleaning, data labelling, visualisation, analytics, AI readiness, and data governance and compliance, for example.
- AI Partner of the Year: recognises Australian partners projects that helped customers with AI. This includes projects involving generative AI, including projects involving AI chatbots and AI agents, and projects involving other types of AI.
- Enterprise Applications Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner projects that helped customers with enterprise applications. This includes projects involving ERP, CRM, project & workflow management, for example.
- Managed Services Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner work that helped customers manage ICT, such as security, devices, networks and infrastructure, cloud, data, communications, or print, for example.
- Security Partner of the Year: recognising Australian partner projects that helped customers with security, including cybersecurity and digital-physical security (such as electronic surveillance). This includes work on governance, risk, certification and compliance, detection and response, and identity & access management, for example.
- Project of the Year: Chosen by the techpartner.news editorial team from projects nominated for project award categories.
Partner People Awards:
- Marketing Leader of the Year: For example, head of marketing or CMO
- Sales Leader of the Year: For example, commercial director or head of sales
- Business Leader of the Year: For example, MD, owner, partner or C-level
- Technology Leader of the Year: For example, CIO, CISO or head of technology
- Technical Specialist of the Year: For example, developers, analysts, system administrators, engineers or solution architects.
- Emerging Leader of the Year: Recognising an employee who showed leadership potential, initiative and early impact
- Community Leader of the Year: Recognising an employee who uplifted the IT channel, broader business community and/or social impact causes.
- Leader of the Year: Chosen by techpartner.news editorial team from people nominated for people categories.
When is the Deadline to Enter?
Entries close on Tuesday 12th May at 5PM AEST.
Partners - How to Enter
Partner entries are open. Enter here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PLN2G6W
Distributors/Marketplaces & Vendors - How to Enter
We will announce separate categories for distributors and vendors soon.
What are the rules, dos and don'ts?
More questions?
If you have still have questions after downloading and reading the entry form, contact us here.
