The 2026 Partner Award Categories 

By "Partner", we mean such businesses as MSPs, resellers, consultants, system integrators and cybersecurity services providers. Distributors/Marketplaces and vendors are NOT eligible for these categories.

Partner Awards - Categories

Partner Project Awards:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Project of the Year: Chosen by the techpartner.news editorial team from projects nominated for project award categories.

Partner People Awards:

1. Marketing Leader of the Year: For example, head of marketing or CMO
2. Sales Leader of the Year: For example, commercial director or head of sales
3. Business Leader of the Year: For example, MD, owner, partner or C-level
4. Technology Leader of the Year: For example, CIO, CISO or head of technology
5. Technical Specialist of the Year: For example, developers, analysts, system administrators, engineers or solution architects.
6. Emerging Leader of the Year: Recognising an employee who showed leadership potential, initiative and early impact
7. Community Leader of the Year: Recognising an employee who uplifted the IT channel, broader business community and/or social impact causes.
8. Leader of the Year: Chosen by techpartner.news editorial team from people nominated for people categories.