Enterprises CIOs who recommend investment in quantum computing technology will be better prepared for major industry change.
Research firm Gartner estimates that 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies will be budgeting for quantum computing projects by 2021.
According to Gartner, CIOs must begin exploring the quantum technology now or risk falling behind.
Research agency Forrester, revealing the outlook for quantum computing for 2018, said it expects initial progress to be slow, but the pace of acceleration will grow exponentially. Select enterprise CIOs will capitalize on first-mover advantages to achieve smaller but significant gains over their competition over the next five years.
A recent Forrester report said enterprise CIOs must improve their understanding of the quantum computing technology and its providers, or risk becoming laggards once the technology matures and quantum computers become an unstoppable disruptive force.
Quantum computing in action
Quantum computers have the potential to address problems faster than conventional computers. Germany-based automobile major Volkswagen in 2017 began using quantum machines from D-Wave Systems to optimize traffic flow.
Volkswagen in June 2018 announced that it is using quantum computing for the development of new battery technology. Along with IoT and Artificial intelligence, the objective of this investment is to intensify the level of digitalization. This supports new business objectives to make work simpler, more secure and more efficient.
In 2017, IT services company Accenture and 1Qubit collaborated with Biogen to speed up drug discovery using quantum computing. Through quantum-enabled optimization, sampling and machine learning algorithms, these companies have made way for pharmaceutical advancements and cures for a range of diseases.
On April 11, 2018, Atos said its researchers at the Atos Quantum Laboratory have modeled quantum noise and as a result, simulation is more realistic than ever before, and is closer to fulfilling researchers’ requirements.
One of the most important applications of quantum computing is in the category of machine learning. Since quantum machines process data in seconds, this helps companies increase enterprises’ ability to process information, derive insights and accelerate the adoption of AI and make it more efficient.
On 18 December 2017, Researchers at Rigetti Computing, a company based in California, used one of its quantum chips to run a clustering algorithm. Clustering is a machine-learning technique used to organize data into similar groups. As of today, the company has raised around $70 million from investors.
Another area of quantum application is sampling. This is a platform where companies try to find the best answer out of a complex set of alternatives.
On 12 March 2018, Google announced its plans to demonstrate that quantum computers can perform quantum supremacy. This was proved by Google building 50-qubit processors to solve quantum sampling problems. A system called Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) was carried out to help initiate the sampling from the probability of randomly chosen quantum circuits.
A report by Homeland Security Research predicted that quantum computing will grow 25 percent a year through 2024 and will reach $8.45 billion in products and services and $2.25 billion on government-funded research.
Since quantum devices can perform a computational task beyond the capabilities of supercomputers, enterprises are bound to heavily invest. It also benefits them by finding better approximate solutions within a shorter amount of time.
Yadawanka Pala
