Economic advantage: Preparing for lift off

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Talent poaching within industry first warning of things to come

JPMorgan Chase announced on Jan. 22, 2020, the hiring of Marco Pistoia from IBM. A 24-year IBM employee with numerous patents to his credit, Pistoia most recently led an IBM team responsible for quantum computing algorithms. Algorithm development will be key to developing soundly engineered quantum computing systems that can deliver the business outcomes enterprises seek at a faster and more accurate pace than current classical computing systems.

A senior hire into a flagship enterprise in the financial services industry is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, as TBR believes such actions suggest our prediction of quantum achieving economic advantage by 2021 remains on target. Quantum executives discuss the three pillars of quantum commercialization as being:

  • Ongoing scientific discovery to improve the overall fidelity of quantum computing systems; discovery is not the same as a technology road map. These advancements are not easy to predict given the limited supply of individuals skilled in the topics as well as the challenge of pursuing breakthroughs solving the known unknowns.
  • Great advancements have been made in curating scientific discoveries into system components able to generate sufficient yield quality in manufacturing.
  • Application discovery has early activity, most notably in academic research institutions but also within blue chip establishments in the areas of financial services, healthcare, materials science and native cloud companies.

Scientific and engineering obstacles persist, bottlenecking progress. The fluid nature of IP sharing and innovation through ecosystem participation across the above three pillars means businesses that have a trusted track record around groundbreaking innovations will be first to gain the aforementioned economic advantage. As advantage nears, the early adopters will require senior talent with the vision to look across the landscape of technologies and potential use cases and prioritize efforts to gain advantage. Pistoia’s remit will be as the lead researcher for JPMorgan Chase’s Future Lab for Applied Research and Engineering, which seeks out commercial use cases around emerging technologies such as quantum, edge computing, 5G and IoT to create market distinction.

What lessons can be learned from this strategic hire in a domain with acute skills scarcities?

Losing a valued contributor to scientific innovation can certainly hinder an organization such as IBM and decimate smaller firms more reliant on a few key executives. The movement, however, is neither uncommon in industry nor unexpected. Leading technology companies and the professional services firms that translate their capabilities into business results are in the same situation as JPMorgan. Most companies in the industry have focused more on science and engineering than on translating these technical advancements into business value. As economic advantage nears, TBR expects:

  • Talent poaching between technology companies and the leading-edge enterprises they support will accelerate.
  • Advisory services and road maps will be built out rapidly. Smaller, quantum-specific firms will seek to establish these road maps out of necessity, while the advisory firms will likewise seek to find repeatable frameworks to scale across their existing account base. For example, IBM helps enterprises with early exploration through its QStart program while startup Xanadu has built a services team focused on executive education, early corporate preparations or prioritizations, and then the requisite technical training and technical diagnostic services to partner with first-mover enterprises.
  • The ecosystem will be further developed for the cross-sharing of algorithms and best practices as they pertain to the early use cases where economic advantage will appear first.
  • Industry hype and impatience around expected investment returns from enterprise leadership and venture capitalists will continue to present challenges.

Quantum is not a short-term opportunistic investment. In TBR’s opinion, it remains a necessary long-term investment where diligence coupled with patience situate enterprises to exploit first-mover advantage as well as mitigate the risks of falling victim to an economic extinction event brought about by competitor advancements in determining where, and in what sequence, quantum can yield economic advantage.

TBR’s next Quantum Computing Market Landscape will explore the professional services offerings in place or being established by the key market entrants and is due for publication in June 2020. We welcome input on the topical questions our readership would like to see addressed.

Other recent quantum-related publications:

Quick quantum quips: Cloud players are now looking for a piece of the quantum pie

Translating quantum science into business value: Tradeoffs between precision, speed and cost

Quick quantum quips: Hardware entrances gain VC funds while established innovators partner across architectures to secure a place in the broader quantum ecosystem

Traditional ports and quantum computing: The now and the future

Quick quantum quips: A call for quantum supremacy sends ripples through the market

Can IBM pivot fast enough?

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This week, TBR publishes its initial thoughts on IBM’s 4Q19 performance, featuring insights from our data center and professional services analysts.

“Another quarter, another IBM Initial Response from TBR. And while our initial report on IBM’s earnings release remains constant, IBM’s strategy and investment focuses continue to pivot,” says Analyst Stephanie Long. “This quarter we’re looking at recent developments in IBM’s quantum computing business, including how high-performance computing ties into the market, as well as what’s new in IBM’s Systems Hardware portfolio and strategy.”

Senior Analyst Elitsa Bakalova adds, “IBM is winning transformational deals that include consulting, implementation and management of next-generation solutions such as cloud, AI, blockchain and IoT. IBM is advancing in quantum computing research and expanding outside the U.S., in Germany and Japan, to broaden the practical application of quantum computing and speed up the development of the digital economy. Enabling hybrid cloud adoption remains at the forefront of IBM’s strategy, and the extended partnerships with VMware and HCL Technologies solidify IBM’s ability to transform clients’ infrastructure and application environments.”

Additional assessments from our analyst teams

“Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) closed 2019 with continued revenue growth, which TBR attributes to ongoing investments in its solution suite and talent pool, alongside aggressive pricing. Strengthening its digital capabilities that enable technology-based transformation, at scale, for the company’s global clientele will drive further growth in 2020. Additionally, preserving a low turnover rate compared to India-centric peers will be important for TCS.” — Kevin Collupy, Analyst

On Wednesday Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan, Senior Analyst Boz Hristov, Analyst Kevin Collupy and Research Analyst Kelly Lesiczka discussed IT services and professional services market developments of 2019 and expectations for 2020, including why TBR anticipates at least one IT services vendor or management consultancy calling an end to the term “digital.” Check out the replay of this webinar, “The end of ‘digital,’ anytime in TBR’s Webinar Portal.

HP Inc. reaffirms its rejection of Xerox offer

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As of this writing, Xerox is attempting a hostile takeover of HP Inc., after HP Inc.’s board reiterated its rejection of Xerox’s offer on Jan. 9, 2020, and has obtained a commitment for the necessary $24 million loan to complete the deal should HP Inc. accept a Xerox offer.

HP Inc. continues to contend Xerox’s valuation of approximately $33 billion is too low, implying it would consider an offer with a higher valuation. HP Inc.’s stock market valuation is almost four times that of Xerox.

Acquisition remains a possibility

HP Inc.’s board has signaled its willingness to consider higher offers, as the driver of the offer, activist investor Carl Icahn, is a major stockholder in both companies and there is considerable overlap among leading institutional investors in both companies. Nevertheless, since the first offer was made, HP Inc.’s stock has increased in value and Xerox’s has decreased, making the proposed acquisition less attractive to shareholders. Xerox is limited in how much it can increase its offer, since higher offers would increase the debt carried by the new company.

Supporters of the acquisition recognize that Xerox’s and HP Inc.’s printing and printing-related services businesses are very complementary. Xerox is stronger in the enterprise, while HP Inc. is stronger with SMBs. HP Inc. relies on a strong channel, with emphasis on value-added services, and Xerox has a larger direct business, with channel partners relegated more to a reseller model. Xerox owns a more comprehensive services business, Xerox Business Services, that retains its locally and vertically oriented subsidiaries. HP Inc. is relatively stronger outside North America, especially with SMBs.

But it could go the other way

Because of its larger size and lower debt burden, HP Inc. is positioned to counteroffer Xerox with an offer to merge. The companies were in talks before Xerox’s original offer, and HP Inc.’s objection to the current offer is regarding valuation, so TBR believes HP Inc.’s board would consider a merger on better terms. Both companies are executing restructuring plans that involve headcount reduction to adapt to the globally shrinking market for printing, and therefore, print supplies, which has been a profitable part of both businesses. Both restructuring plans are also aggressive, Xerox’s more so than that of HP Inc. However, TBR believes Xerox’s proposed plan for the new company is too aggressive for HP Inc., suggesting an HP Inc. acquisition of Xerox, or a more equal merger, would not align with the plans of Icahn or the Xerox board.

3D printing: HP Inc.’s unhidden gem

The not-so-hidden gem in the HP Inc. portfolio is additive manufacturing, more commonly called 3D printing. HP Inc. has more than a decade of research in this field, growing out of the inkjet business. It has products and customers and regularly announces partnerships, small acquisitions and improvements in speed, size and materials. TBR believes 3D printing is a slow-moving, large-scale disruptor, starting with medical applications and retail customization and expanding into repair parts and low-volume manufacturing. Over time, 3D printing will drive top-line growth that the mature PC and printing businesses cannot. Xerox’s plan includes 3D printing, but it is one of many ostensibly adjacent businesses in which it has an interest. It is not clear that a Xerox-led merged company would continue to make the investments necessary to capitalize on this gem.

The PC impact

The big question for the PC industry is what a unified company would do with HP Inc.’s PC business. For HP Inc., PCs are a relatively low-margin business but generate a considerable amount of cash because of an advantageous cash conversion cycle. Spinning off or selling the PC business to reduce the new company’s debt burden is one possibility; however, Xerox has plans to leverage HP Inc. to make its services businesses more comprehensive, effectively combining managed print services with PCaaS.

There are no obvious acquirers for HP Inc.’s PC business. Acquisition by HP Inc.’s primary competitors, Dell Technologies and Lenovo, would probably be met with regulatory objections. Huawei is too restricted in the U.S. market, due to concerns over Huawei device security, to profit from such a deal. These facts suggest that an offer for HP Inc.’s PC business would be too low for the new entity’s needs.

Irrespective of the future of this deal, the uncertainty has opened up opportunities for HP Inc.’s primary PC competitors among customers and partners. While a merger would be more disruptive than the uncertainty, a spinoff or sale of HP Inc.’s PC business would be more disruptive than a merger. And TBR believes the uncertainty of this deal will continue to hinder HP Inc. as a whole until issues are resolved.

Sustained growth provides Accenture with the flexibility to enact internal and operational changes

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In this week’s Accenture report, Senior Analyst Boz Hristov notes, “Accenture’s robust account management capabilities and diversified footprint supported continued profitable growth in FY1Q20 (CY4Q19), leading to increased market share. TBR does not expect major changes to the course of the company’s go-to-market strategy following the announced changes on Jan. 13 to its growth model, as client demand for globally supported, locally sourced services align well with Accenture’s integrated scale. TBR will provide further analysis of these changes during 1Q20.”

Additional assessments from our analyst teams

“As reported in the IT Services Vendor Benchmark, trailing 12-month IT services revenue growth decelerated year-to-year in 3Q19 as competitive pressures in traditional and emerging IT service areas, such as digital, cloud and cybersecurity, combined with unfavorable market dynamics tied to rising macroeconomic uncertainties and pockets of tight spending, slowed vendors’ revenue performance during the quarter. Average profitability for benchmarked vendors contracted year-to-year in 3Q19, and five of the top 10 operating margin leaders experienced the negative trend. Some of the vendors are finding it hard to balance addressing revenue pressures with investing in portfolio expansion, talent development and service delivery improvement such as through automation.” — Elitsa Bakalova, Senior Analyst

“In 4Q19 Wipro announced the opening of multiple centers globally. Specifically, Wipro opened a next-generation engineering and innovation center in Virginia that will focus on domain-centric use cases and add 200 jobs to its workforce of 500 in the area. Further, Wipro launched a NextGen Cyber Defense Center in Australia with plans to hire 100 cybersecurity personnel. TBR believes the new centers are aimed at diversifying Wipro’s APAC revenue base by driving traction with Australian government agencies for services like cyber resiliency and digital protection, supported by Wipro’s plans to open additional centers in Australia.” — Patrick M. Heffernan, Principal Analyst

On Wednesday Analyst Stephanie Long and Principal Analyst Geoff Woollacott will host a live webinar on the 2020 outlook of the data center market, including how data center vendors are investing in various emerging technologies to augment their portfolios and maintain relevance as legacy portfolios become commoditized. Register today for an opportunity to participate in this exclusive Q&A!

Twins born early in 2020

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New year, new buys. And if your name is Accenture, it may be not too surprising to see twin acquisitions within the first week of 2020. In back-to-back announcements less than 24 hours apart, Accenture unveiled its plans to acquire Germany-based SAP shop maihiro and Symantec’s Cyber Security Services business. Maihiro will deepen Accenture’s SAP C/4HANA capabilities while Symantec’s cyber business buy will add a node (or six) to a well-established network of cyber managed services capabilities around the globe. Each acquisition is a natural extension of Accenture’s previous investments, including the company’s work with SAP around project Elevate and Accenture Security’s role as the connective tissue in the company’s innovation-led agenda. While some may consider the two buys mutually exclusive, we see enough overlap, considering the collaboration between Accenture Interactive and Accenture Technology when it comes to developing front-office, cloud-enabled and secured customer experience solutions, alleviating enterprise buyers’ pain points around managing first-party data.

We do not expect Accenture to slow its pursuit of acquisitions, considering the company’s announced intent to spend $1.6 billion in FY20. Many anticipate the next purchase will support a high-growth initiative such as Industry X.0 or will perhaps explore another agency buy similar to that of Droga5. Regardless, Accenture takes a well-rounded approach to developing its functional (e.g., technological) expertise, similar to how it ensures industry-vertical-aligned revenues and capabilities are well balanced and diversified. For example, each of the company’s five operating groups generates about one-fifth of total sales. With all the acquisitions Accenture makes, and has made for the past five to six years, the question of how best to integrate talent often arises. While some amount of turnover is inevitable for one reason or the other — often acquired talent from small firms cannot adapt to a larger organization and all the processes and policies that may come with it — these policies and processes reflect Accenture’s core command-and-control-style organization, helping the company execute its integration strategy quite successfully.

Will the next buy continue to support Accenture’s “in the new” agenda? Highly likely. Which area? Only Accenture knows. But, according to TBR’s Digital Transformation Insights research, cloud remains the most adopted technology among digital transformation buyers. Accenture recently launched two cloud solutions, myNav and Accenture Cloud Native Core Solution, suggesting the company is not finished building its portfolio and capabilities in the space.

TBR will continue to monitor and analyze Accenture’s acquisitions and overall go-to-market strategy, along with its financial performance across TBR’s professional services, cloud and telecom research portfolios.

Informatica empowers business users and improves customer success in its Winter ’20 release

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The new capabilities of Informatica’s winter release make data more consumable for business users

Organizations have a bevy of data spanning their on-premises and cloud environments and a growing number of employees utilizing that data — from more technical personnel, such as data scientists who are using the data to create AI and machine learning models, to data analysts and business users who are leveraging data for analytics. Simultaneously, government regulations around data privacy, such as the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the European Union, are becoming more stringent across geographies, requiring enterprises have visibility into and control over all their data.

Informatica, through its iPaaS portfolio, can enable enterprises to derive greater value from their data sets and meet these tightening regulations with governance tools. Informatica further defined its value proposition at its Winter 2020 virtual launch event in December, announcing numerous product enhancements and capabilities, including improvements to its data governance and customer success solutions that help analysts and nontechnical business users leverage their company’s data.

As data regulations tighten, Informatica maintains governance while simplifying data requisition

Informatica’s recent updates around data governance and privacy include two key areas of the process: helping customers understand the quality of their data and streamlining their data processing pipeline. The vendor is using natural language processing to automatically generate a data quality maplet based on the functional specifications outlined by a customer’s data steward. This capability significantly reduces time to value for data sets, as data stewards typically have to collaborate with subject matter experts to create a maplet, a process that could take weeks before data can be fully utilized.

To empower business users and analysts once the data is available for analytics and reporting, Informatica created the Informatica Data Marketplace, a feature in the vendor’s Axon Data Governance offering. The marketplace is akin to consumer-oriented online shopping experiences, as business users and analysts can search data by category, subcategory and other filters. Once an employee requests a data set, it alerts the relevant data steward regarding which data set the employee would like and the intended use of the asset. Enabling data stewards to accept or deny access to these requests ensures that governance policies are still being met while democratizing data by giving data consumers more autonomy. TBR expects this will be a noteworthy selling point for Informatica as it engages with modernizing enterprises that are faced with complexities in their data governance growing alongside the number of employees consuming data.

Informatica’s enhanced Customer Success Platform helps customers from onboarding to ongoing

Business-to-business technology providers that will succeed in the 2020s understand customer success is a strategic imperative. Gone are the days of binary, transaction-oriented customer relationships with communication blackouts between product sale and renewal. Informatica understands this shift in business buying behavior, highlighted by new Customer Success Platform capabilities including the DIANA intelligent agent for license and administrative support, personalized recommendations for employee onboarding and training, product learning paths with novice to expert-level training on Informatica products, and support from Informatica experts through Concierge.

Informatica is ensuring organizations are attaining the greatest value from its offerings by scaling customers’ workforces with on-demand training, and once trained, enabling the workforce to solve issues on an ongoing basis via DIANA and Informatica experts. TBR believes these capabilities will make Informatica stickier in customers’ organizations, further increasing renewal rates throughout its customer base.

Informatica has positioned itself for success as enterprises demand more personalized engagement

In an era where customers are adopting best-of-breed offerings from multiple vendors, enterprises need a third-party integration provider that can unify their entire IT environment. Informatica will remain a leading vendor in this regard, as its ongoing innovation will continue to appeal to technical personnel such as data engineers and data scientists, while becoming more attractive to business decision makers with new capabilities at the business user level. Furthermore, Informatica’s investment in customer success will help attract and retain customers as enterprises expect, and demand, more personal vendor engagement.

Proximity or scale? Will Latin America’s startup scene challenge India’s?

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Here’s a simple question: Can a startup scene in nearshore Americas rival the one in India? Could countries and markets geographically closer to the U.S. provide the kind of energy and entrepreneurship coming from India, particularly in emerging technologies?

A few weeks ago, TBR analysts spoke at length with a PwC partner in India about the startup community and learned how a few key elements have been coming together in recent years to make that country a growing hub for digital transformation innovations. And recently, we noticed a Nearshore America’s piece on the innovation investment in Latin America that made us consider how the two regions compare.

India has some distinct advantages, particularly as digital transformation begins to mature and offshoring, scale and agility become critical to sustained success in delivering IT services enabled by emerging technologies. India also has an education system naturally geared to support a global, English-speaking technology environment, plus increasing support from two different groups: global consultancies looking for creativity and international venture investors and banks looking for new and fast-growing revenue streams.

The questions for Latin America-based startups and their various backers, including local, regional and federal governments trying to incubate and accelerate innovation, likely do not center on competitors two continents away, especially as those startups remain focused mostly on their own markets. But both startup scenes look to the same global markets for investors, clients and, eventually, scale, so IT and emerging tech startups in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Peru need to consider how they compare and what will drive additional — global and sustained — interest and investment.

In early 2020 TBR will speak with consulting and IT services leaders across major vendors, including Accenture, PwC, EY and IBM, about their experiences in and expectations for the Latin America startup and innovation scene, where they see opportunities, and how global firms weigh the potential returns on investment in that region compared to in India.

As digital transformation matures, customers voice their concerns about data and scale

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This week TBR wraps up its 2019 digital transformation insights research with our Voice of the Customer report, in which Senior Analyst Boz Hristov notes, “More buyers are beginning to embark on full transformations as new technologies promising faster, scalable outcomes push buyers to ramp investments and AI and analytics gain mindshare. Vendors can take advantage of buyers’ increased investments in AI and analytics and demonstrate tangible ROI, but only if they can guarantee they are using cleansed data.”

Additional assessments publishing this week from our analyst teams

“Forging closer relationships with clients in select regions enables opportunities to upsell and cross-sell emerging solutions and attach services as clients continue to modernize IT environments. HPE provides the infrastructure needed to modernize clients’ IT environments, creating opportunities for HPE Pointnext’s expertise around close-to-the-box services and solutions.” — Kevin Collupy, Analyst

“TBR’s 3Q19 Dell Technologies report dives deep into the complex market dynamics impacting the vendor’s go-forward path. Ongoing server market softness has caused some pivots within the Infrastructure Solutions Group’s initial 2019 goals, and VMware’s transition to more of a subscription sales model coupled with the associated expenses of completed and pending acquisitions add wrinkles to the vendor’s financial story.” — Stephanie Long, Analyst

“The 3Q19 Hewlett Packard Enterprise report tunes its lens to the implications of Antonio Neri’s Everything as a Service by 2022 goal. The impact of this goal will be felt, both positive and negative, throughout the next year as the vendor’s financials adjust to a subscription selling model from a transaction selling model and as customer demand for consumption-based pricing is increasingly satisfied by these changes.” — Stephanie Long

 “As Accenture wraps up 2019 we expect the company to continue to capitalize on its momentum, targeting Diamond clients by deploying industrialized, AI-enabled solutions. We expect Industry X.0 and other similar initiative to further support the company’s efforts to secure core revenues as buyers embark on broad-based transformation initiatives.” — Boz Hristov

“As discussed in TBR’s Hyperconverged & Converged Market Landscape, the emergence of public cloud competition in the private cloud market, as vendors seek to capitalize on the rising trend of hybrid cloud adoption, has created unique and complex dynamics for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors to navigate in the HCI space. These vendors not only continue to grapple with hardware commoditization and the ongoing emphasis on software in HCI sales, but now also face an additional angle of competition from the public cloud side, as Amazon Web Services makes Outposts generally available and Microsoft’s Azure Stack increasingly resonates with customers for hybrid cloud. On the other hand, HCI’s applicability to the edge is also resonating and creates additional pockets of opportunity for HCI vendors. Similar market dynamics are being noted in TBR’s upcoming Hyperconverged Platforms Customer Research, which examines the market through a customer-centric lens.” — Stephanie Long

Traditional business models continue shifting for management consultancies

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This week TBR publishes its semiannual Management Consulting Benchmark, and Senior Analyst Elitsa Bakalova notes the following: “Vendors compete for holistic transformation opportunities and expand the breadth of their portfolios and resources to provide clients with offerings that augment consulting value propositions by integrating consulting with IP-based solutions and managed services. As consulting teams continue to diversify, combining consultants with data scientists, designers and solution architects, vendors’ strategies around human resource management will prove increasingly vital to long-term success. Recruitment will need to be paired with employee engagement initiatives, corporate social responsibility tactics and performance management systems that attract and retain top employees.”

Additional assessments publishing this week from our analyst teams

“DXC Technology’s leadership, headed by the company’s new CEO Mike Salvino, is actively pursuing strategic alternatives for three of DXC’s businesses: U.S., state and local health and human services; business process services; and workplace and mobility. TBR believes DXC’s decision to spin off these businesses will provide the vendor with much-needed capital to continue to scale out its digital healthcare portfolio, particularly as it comes under increasing competition from digitally fluent vendors including Allscripts and Cerner in core markets, such as electronic health records (EHR).” — Kevin Collupy, Analyst

“As Deloitte morphs its value proposition toward an ‘as a Services’ firm, bundling proprietary IP in service contracts helps it drive profitable growth. At the same time, attaining and retaining IT trained staff can prove difficult for a legacy consulting firm, compelling Deloitte to explore new ways to increase retention.” – Boz Hristov, Senior Analyst

Quick Quantum Quips: Hardware entrants gain VC funds while established innovators partner across architectures to secure a place in the broader quantum ecosystem

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The quantum market changes rapidly, and the hype can often distract from the realities of the technological developments. In our new monthly newsletter, Quick Quantum Quips (Q3), TBR will brief readers on the latest market announcements, stripping that hype to dig deeper into how recent events will impact the market as a whole. Contact Stephanie Long ([email protected]) or Geoff Woollacott ([email protected]) to schedule a time to chat on any of the insights below.

November 2019 developments:

  1. Microsoft partnered with IonQ and Honeywell, which will provide the foundational quantum hardware for Microsoft’s Azure Quantum cloud. This was a major announcement in the quantum computing space in terms of real-world application of the technology. Microsoft can now tie its traditional cloud capabilities in with quantum offerings, addressing customer demands for a hybrid computing and flexible quantum experience. TBR notes that IonQ and Honeywell both focus on trapped ion quantum computing, suggesting Microsoft deliberately chose these vendors for their unique hardware capabilities. Partnerships in the quantum space have been ramping up in general, especially between hardware and software players, as these vendors take lessons from classical computing speedbumps and streamline their processes for the quantum era.
  2. Fermilab launched a new Institute for Quantum Science, reaffirming the U.S. government’s interest in leveraging the technology for various uses. Fermilab is more formally known as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and has been investing in particle physics and accelerator technology for more than 50 years.
  3. IBMcontinues to pursue its cross-technology strategy to partner for accelerated innovation. We have seen this strategy play out for IBM in various markets, including blockchain and AI with Watson. Most recently in the quantum space, IBM unveiled a partnership with the Unitary Fund to jointly develop open-source projects for quantum computing. Additionally, IBM’s recent partnership with IonQ regarding QisKit reinforces IBM’s overall vendor agnosticism despite targeted hardware investments in superconducting quantum computing. The vendor seeks to capitalize on the most lucrative aspects of the larger quantum market.
  4. PsiQuantum is a stealth quantum startup focused on developing quantum hardware. Of  significance is PsiQuantum’s ability to recently raise $230 million while remaining relatively quiet, suggesting the startup’s road map is highly desired by investors. It is likely that the investment PsiQuantum received is one of the largest in the quantum industry to date, making this even more significant. PsiQuantum has offices in the U.K. and the U.S. and is developing a general-purpose silicon photon quantum computer. Its U.S. location in Palo Alto, Calif.,  positions the startup nicely within Silicon Valley, where it can readily access chip manufacturing expertise.  PsiQuantum’s founder, Jeremy O’Brien, is a professor at the University of Bristol and the director for the Centre for Quantum Photonics.
  5. Atos partnered with Zapata with the goal of delivering an end-to-end quantum computing solution by combining Zapata’s Orquestra quantum software with Atos’ Quantum Learning Machine. The solution is expected to be able to address specific vertical market demands. TBR believes the software functionality will be tweaked to enable this vertical differentiation.

That is all for this month’s Quick Quantum Quips from TBR. If you wish to receive more detailed information around the quantum computing market, please inquire about TBR’s Quantum Computing Market Landscape, a semiannual deep-dive into the quantum computing market.