Interview | Dr. Bob Sutor, VP - IBM Q Strategy and Ecosystem, IBM
Dr. Bob Sutor, VP - IBM Q Strategy and Ecosystem at IBM shares his thoughts on the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2021, the progress of Quantum computing adoption and is biggest area of focus within Quantum over the next 12 months.
Don't miss new reports! Sign up for The Quantum.Tech Newsletter
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2021?
The first challenge is that some people have not yet formulated their quantum computing strategy, thereby delaying their eventual time-to-market advantage. The second is developer training: thousands of coders have learned Qiskit, but the industry will need tens or hundreds of thousands of quantum-fluent software engineers. Finally, even more people need to be using actual quantum hardware now, because that’s the future and that’s where we’ll see breakthrough advantages.
Looking ahead a year from now, how do you see the adoption of Quantum computing progressing?
I think that when IBM Quantum breaks through the 100-qubit mark on a cloud-based quantum system in 2021, it will be a huge psychological boost to everyone. This will give even more confidence to those in industry beginning to adopt quantum and those in university who are choosing their fields of study. By the end of this year, I expect users will have run over 1 trillion quantum circuits on the IBM Cloud. That’s astounding.
What is going to be the biggest area of focus for your organisation within Quantum over the next 12 months?
IBM is the most complete top-to-bottom, left-to-right quantum computing hardware, software, and systems provider. Our main focus will remain helping clients get the earliest possible quantum advantage and benefit for their businesses and organizations.
Can you share an example of how your platform or application has been used by a new customer? Feel free to include any feedback or practical examples.
Our research teams at IBM and ExxonMobil collaborated to model maritime inventory routing problems on quantum devices and develop practical approaches for their solution. In our recently published IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering paper, “Formulating and Solving Routing Problems on Quantum Computers,” we analyzed the strengths and trade-offs of different mathematical formulations for vehicle (and inventory) routing from a quantum computing perspective. Our research enables us to offer strategies for modeling maritime routing on quantum devices to explore complex business-relevant problems such as routing problems.
In a new preprint now on arXiv, “A Threshold for Quantum Advantage in Derivative Pricing”, our quantum research teams at IBM and Goldman Sachs provide the first detailed estimate of the quantum computing resources needed to achieve quantum advantage for derivative pricing – one of the most ubiquitous calculations in finance.
We describe the challenges in previous quantum approaches to this problem, and introduce a new method for overcoming those obstacles. The new approach – called the re-parameterization method – combines pre-trained quantum algorithms with approaches from fault-tolerant quantum computing to dramatically cut the estimated resource requirements for pricing financial derivatives using quantum computers.
Top tips: What is the best single piece of advice you can give to an enterprise looking to start their Quantum journey?
Start now. Explore the IBM Quantum business use cases. Firm up your adoption and education strategy. Make your developers quantum-fluent by learning Qiskit on quantum systems on the IBM Cloud.
What are you most looking forward to at the Quantum.Tech digital event?
I’m lucky enough to have been at 3 or 4 four previous Quantum.Tech events, so I like to gauge how the audience changes over time. I’m curious to see what the mix of early adopters and people new to the technology will be. I’m also wondering how much people can differentiate between the rates of progress of the various quantum systems on the cloud. The gaps are significant, and I think that gets lost in the discussion sometimes.