Interview | Marco Magagnini, Partner at Data Reply
Marco Magagnini, Partner at Data Reply shares his thoughts on the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2021, how best to engage and support the business to adopt Quantum technologies and his best advice to an enterprise looking to start their Quantum journey.
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What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2021?
Quantum Computing is going to be disruptive. However, the current state of Quantum hardware is putting off the adoption of Quantum technologies. Also, a look at longer-term benefits is needed. From our experience some benefits have already been found in the Optimization field today. That is why we have developed MegaQUBO, our accelerator for Quantum-inspired optimization in production for large-scale applications.
What is going to be the biggest area of focus for your organisation within Quantum over the next 12 months?
We are currently working on finding optimal solutions for Optimization problems, especially in the energy sector, and we believe that by using MegaQUBO we will keep gaining concrete results with our customers. We are also working and exploring Quantum for Finance and Quantum Machine Learning, which could be greatly impacted from Quantum Hardware enhancements. One last topic we are going to focus on is Quantum Chemistry.
Can you share an example of how your platform or application has been used by a new customer?
We have recently used MegaQUBO for a use case of workforce management that required dozens of thousands of variables. Our solver has been able to minimize the distance travelled by the workers as well as maximize the number of jobs completed daily. This approach allowed us to find a better solution compared to the classical approach, hence letting our customer reduce costs in terms of both resources and time. We have also investigated running smaller instances of the problem on Quantum hardware.
Top tips: What is the best single piece of advice you can give to an enterprise looking to start their Quantum journey?
Obtaining results (even in the short term) with Quantum is easier than it seems, and I can suggest 3 steps as a roadmap for the short term and long term:
- Select a Use Case that requires high computational power
- Introduce quantum algorithms to enhance performances with the help of Quantum Experts
- Let classical hardware handle the algorithms to find results today
In the future, deploy the algorithm on Quantum Hardware with ease and benefit from Quantum Supremacy.
Top tips: How can you best engage and support the business to adopt Quantum technologies?
Our Quantum Experts can help the business go through the journey for adopting Quantum Computing strategies, from spotting the right problems suitable for a Quantum approach to explore the technical details required to solve them.
As Data Reply we can’t wait to share with you the expertise that we have developed over the years and explore together the benefits Quantum can bring.
Feel free to contact us at info.data.it@reply.it
What are you most looking forward to at the Quantum.Tech digital event?
A few years ago, we started exploring Quantum Computing applied to optimization problems. Up to now, we have already developed several projects with our customers, some of which are in production. We would like to bring our experience to Quantum.Tech and meet other Quantum Computing experts and enthusiasts to be entangled with the community and companies interested in the field.