Who Owns the IP When You Hire a Quantum Consultant

Summary

Yianni Gamvros, Head of Business Development at QCWare is interviewed by Yuval Boger. Yianni and Yuval talk about Q2B, the annual trade show that QCWare produces, intellectual property ownership when providing professional services, the importance of investments in software benchmarking, and much more.

Read the full transcript on the Quantum Computing Report site

Transcript

Yuval Boger: Hello, Yianni, and thanks for joining me today.

Yianni Gamvros: Hi, Yuval. It's great to be here.

Yuval: So who are you and what do you do?

Yianni: My name is Yianni Gamvros. I'm the head of business development for QC Ware, so I handle all of sales, business partnerships, and marketing for QC Ware. I also handle all of the decisions, the execution, and the management that goes behind Q2B.

Yuval: So Q2B is a trade show that QC Ware is organizing, right? And this is now its fifth year, sixth year?

Yianni: It's actually its sixth year. Our CEO, Matt Johnson, started the show back in 2017. Back then, there were really no other business shows that dealt with quantum computing. Pretty much everyone who was interested in quantum computing would meet at the academic conferences, and those conferences are typically made for technical talks.

He had the insight to realize that we really need a place where business people can meet and understand the value proposition for quantum computing at a high level, and understand potential use cases and ROI. But obviously, the technical credibility of the show is also important, and having talks and speakers that are credible is also important.

So Q2B tries to be a place for business people to understand the value proposition, but we also invite technical speakers and some technical talks to inform on the technical aspects as well.

Yuval: How much has it grown? How many people were on the first show, if you know, and how many do you expect this year?

Yianni: It's been quite impressive, and it has really grown beyond our expectations. The first show had about 250 attendees, and this last show that we did in Silicon Valley had 609 attendees. It was the first in-person show we had after the virtual show in 2020. The virtual show obviously had more attendees.

We were up to 1,000, but we quickly returned to an exclusively in-person format in 2021. It was actually a little bit aggressive to do it in 2021. We managed to do it even though it was a little bit risky, and we fell between the Delta and Omicron waves, but we still had very good attendance. And the show has actually grown now.

For the first time this year, in 2022, we went to a different geography. We just had a successful show in Japan, Q2B22 Tokyo, which had 370 attendees.

Yuval: So the show aside, how has the quantum computing industry changed in your mind over the last one or two years?

Yianni: It's been unbelievable. The amount of new people coming into the industry, the startups, the announcements, and the projections. Obviously there is some hype.

You can't do without hype, but it's impressive now. I think it's much more professional. We're now getting to the point where we have projections and roadmaps from both software and hardware vendors, and I think that's interesting, because it means that people have a stake in the ground, and they're making projections of what the technology will be able to do and what their products are going to be able to do.

It's hard to say exactly where we are, but it's always important to have these projections, because you can always look back at the last year or last two years and say, "Okay, I know where the projections were two years ago, and I can see where we are today."

So I think that's going to play out over the next couple of years, where we're going to be able to say, "Okay, well, these hardware roadmaps were good," or maybe they were too optimistic, or maybe they were pessimistic, or they were just about right. But we'll see.

Yuval: To me, Q2B is a great show and a great service that you're doing for the industry, but I know that QC Ware does many other things besides Q2B. Could you speak about those a little bit?

Yianni: Of course. QC Ware is primarily a quantum computing software startup. We build quantum algorithms and quantum applications that run on quantum computers and deliver the promised value of quantum computing. Q2B, as you just said, is one of our three go-to-market areas and one of our three business lines.

The other two are professional services for quantum computing and software for quantum computing. For professional services, what we typically do is talk to large enterprises, large industry end users in finance, pharma, automotive, aerospace, and many other industries, and we advise them on how quantum computing will potentially disrupt their different business processes and what they can do to get ready for this upcoming computing disruption.

This might be in the form of an educational workshop in the beginning, or use case discovery. It might be a little more advanced, where we do a proof of concept, applying a known quantum algorithm to their data and looking at the results. Or, the most advanced thing that we do for many of our clients are joint development engagements, where we effectively act as an augmented R&D arm to their current R&D program. We engage in active research, we try to break new ground, we try to do things that haven't been done before, and design new algorithms that can run on quantum computers and deliver value.

In many cases, these engagements have led to publications in very significant journals, have led to patents, and have maybe also led to some press for both us and the customer. So we're very happy to be able to do all these kinds of professional engagements for our customers.

So that was the professional services side. The other thing I mentioned is software, because primarily we want to be a software company, right? We already have a software product called QC Ware Forge. QC Ware Forge currently runs on Amazon Braket, and it's essentially an algorithmic layer and application layer for quantum computing on top of Amazon Braket's platform-as-a-service layer.

We take all the algorithms and all the knowledge that we discovered during the professional service engagements I just mentioned, and we distill that into our software product. We package it and make it readily available for anyone coming fresh into quantum computing, and even for advanced users, to see what we've done for other customers, see what the new algorithms can do and how they execute, and then use the Amazon Braket infrastructure to run them either on simulators or on real hardware.

Yuval: When you spoke about the professional services, you mentioned that one of the outcomes sometimes is patents. I'm curious, what do you do with the IP? Meaning, when a customer brings you in, wouldn't they want to keep the IP that's generated from a project, or is it somehow shared between QC Ware and the customer?

Yianni: Great question. We always try to have this discussion as early as possible.

Sometimes we have it on the very first call, because this does come up, right? Everybody has this question, and it's good to clear the air very early on. Our position is that we like for the customer to be able to use the foreground IP that's generated through a professional service engagement, but we also like to be able to use the IP in any way that we want.

We like to be able to put the new IP into product and potentially resell it to other customers. Obviously, this takes some negotiation with procurement and legal on the customer side, but it's typically something that we can achieve, because we're in such a niche space that our engagements with these customers are not treated as traditional professional services engagements.

We're doing something that's very unique. We bring expertise to the table that's also very unique and very scarce. Therefore, the customer realizes that they do want us to partner with them, and this is a red line that we put in there: hey, look, if we can't use the IP that's generated out of the engagement, then we are not going to engage.

Yuval: Excellent. Thank you for clarifying that. I wanted to ask about both the types of industries and the stage. Are there one or two industries that you see coming into quantum computing more often than others? And I'm also curious about the stage. Do people come and say, "We've heard about quantum, we don't know for sure what it's going to do for us, please help us"?

Or have they seen a competitor or an article someplace and say, "Oh, this is the algorithm we want, we just need it implemented"? Where do they come in, and from what verticals?

Yianni: Great question. I think the most mature industry is finance. We see a lot of different finance players with very mature quantum computing programs, and we actually see new entrants come into the market and very quickly set up dedicated quantum computing teams that are looking into quantum computing 100% of the time.

I think the next one is potentially automotive, where we again see several players with dedicated quantum computing programs. Maybe pharma comes next, and then you have a few other places like energy and aerospace. To a lesser extent you have materials, and to a lesser extent still, pretty much every other industry, like telcos, utilities, and everything else.

To answer the second part of your question, we do see in some cases, especially with finance and in some cases with pharma, companies coming in and dealing with it very strategically, putting a person in charge as a quantum computing director. They give this person headcount, and they can start setting up a program for the company.

In those cases the discussion is more mature. They typically hire people with some quantum computing expertise, and you typically have discussions at a deeper technical level. But as you say, there are some companies that are coming in fresh and just want to test the waters, and they might not have anyone who's dedicated.

They might just have someone in the innovation department or R&D department who has a little bit of a budget to play around with, or is willing to play around with a vendor and some experiments. In those cases we might do something that's a little bit simpler and more short-term, just to give them an idea of what quantum computing looks like, what the approaches are, what the hardware can do at this stage, and so on and so forth.

Yuval: Do you see customers preferring to use shrink-wrapped software? I mean, if there was a sort of algorithm as a service: here is my routing table, show me what the best traveling salesperson solution is. Or do they prefer to try and write their own software and their own algorithms? Which one do you see more commonly?

Yianni: We typically see a little bit of both, because of the two kinds of customers I just described. The more mature ones want to be more hands-on and want to design their own algorithms. The ones that are just testing the waters may have some interest in seeing the shrink-wrapped version, the black box version.

And frankly, my belief is that the shrink-wrapped, black box version is the one that's going to dominate, and the one that we as an industry need to move towards. We cannot expect people to write quantum circuits. I think it's absurd. If you look back at the history of the computing space, obviously that's how computing started, by running these very low-level statements, but it quickly moved on.

I guess I can conclude by saying that in the meantime, quantum computing researchers need to have hands-on tools, dive deeper into technical tools, and be hands-on with the code.

Yuval: What's your best estimate of the time to quantum advantage, when people go beyond "Oh, I'm playing with the technology" to "I can move it into production"? Is it two years? Is it 10 years?

Yianni: We do have a perspective on that. QC Ware has a strong perspective on what will be the first application to exhibit quantum advantage, and we think that's chemistry simulation. We think it's going to take a few years for sure. We think that with a few hundred qubits, and several nines of fidelity on the operations for those qubits, we will be able to get to a point where we can do something that classical computers cannot.

We think in chemistry this is doable, as I said, with a few hundred qubits, because there are some exotic chemistry simulation problems, some exotic materials, that classical methods simply cannot simulate. So we think that's the most near-term application. As for all the other applications that people talk about, we are still confident.

I mean, we're optimists, obviously, and that's why we're in the space, because we believe that quantum computing will change the world. It will impact other areas like optimization, machine learning, other simulations, Monte Carlo simulations, and partial differential equations. But we think those are a little bit further out, probably in the five-plus-year timeframe.

Yuval: Let's assume for the sake of discussion that the first application would be ready for production in three years. There'd be enough qubits, they'd be good enough, the software is there. What do you say to customers who say, "Well, if it's three years away, call me back in two years and then we'll talk"?

Yianni: Great question, and it always comes up. My answer is this: I always challenge the customer back with another question, where I ask them, "How long did your last digital transformation initiative take?" And typically, when they think about it, the answer is actually three, four, five, or more years, right?

If people think back to how long it took to bring the right data scientists into their organization, get those scientists situated and trained, expose them to different business processes and to business domain experts within the organization, let them build initial proofs of concept, and then move those proofs of concept into production, that takes a lot of time.

That takes more than just three or four or five years. So in fact, for chemistry, our position is: hey, look, if you want to be impactful when the first quantum computers arrive and be able to take advantage of that in the market, then in some sense you might already be late.

For machine learning, optimization, and some of these other techniques, you're probably just in time if you start now. For chemistry, you're probably already a little bit behind if it in fact happens in three years.

Yuval: As we get closer to the end of our conversation today, I'm curious: if you had a magic wand, what would you want the industry to do that it's not doing today? Is it more collaboration? Is it to work on one thing more than another? What's your wish for the industry?

Yianni: Great point. I have a wish for the government organizations and the government policy that is supporting quantum computing in a big way, and that's actually a great thing.

But I think a lot of the focus of those initiatives goes into hardware. And obviously, yes, we do need the hardware. You can't run any of these things without the right hardware, and hardware does need to improve, and the faster it improves, the better off everyone is going to be. But being on the software side, and seeing the advances that software can make, I think there needs to be some proportional investment on the software side as well.

Many times, as a software company, we see that all these programs are 100% dedicated to hardware. There are many open questions that software can answer, and there are many ways that software companies can benefit from the right policies and the right investment.

So that's the one thing on the government side. The other thing, potentially also for these government or other consortia, or maybe other vendors, is the generation of use-case-based benchmarks. We've seen a lot of benchmarks and a lot of metrics that concentrate on hardware qualities.

And again, this is important, right? It's good to have multiple metrics. It's probably good to have diverse metrics covering different areas. It's impossible in a very complicated field like ours to have a single metric that covers everything. And it's also important to have benchmarks specifically for the hardware as well.

But it's also very, very important to start having some use-case-specific benchmarks where software vendors can also compete and say, "Okay, we can do this better. We can load an image of this size onto a quantum computer with our software," and another company can load an image that's maybe smaller or larger, and compete on that.

Or, "We can train a quantum neural network this quickly, in so many steps, and this is the accuracy we get." Or, "We can price an asset, a derivative, in so many steps, to this accuracy." And really drive toward the specific metrics that the industry is looking to us to provide for guidance.

Industry end users really don't care about the number of qubits. They care about how big a molecule they can simulate, how complex a derivative they can price, and so on and so forth. So we need to put the benchmarks in those terms and provide those kinds of benchmarks.

Yuval: Benchmarks. Very interesting. My next-to-last question: could you tell me about your personal journey? How did you get into quantum computing?

Yianni: That's quite interesting. I have a technical background, a PhD in operations research. I started my career doing professional services, doing consulting for a software company that built an optimization solver.

I was one of the consultants who would go out and try to build decision support software for different types of industries, like transportation systems and manufacturing. We would build optimization solutions that would try to increase the throughput of a manufacturing plant, or try to help transportation dispatchers dispatch trucks or planes or what have you.

Then we got acquired by IBM. This company, whose name was ILOG, got acquired by IBM. When we got acquired by IBM, I started moving, as I say, to the dark side. I started going more into sales and business development, and slowly within IBM I moved into some sales leadership roles. At that time, I got a LinkedIn message out of the blue from Matt Johnson, the CEO of QC Ware, saying, "Hey, I'm in Palo Alto, do you want to join me for coffee?"

I looked this guy up, and he was the CEO of a quantum computing startup, and that was so foreign at the time. That was maybe 2016, when there was very little in the news about quantum computing. IBM had not yet announced its quantum computing program. It was so, so early, right?

Very, very few people were in quantum computing. It was not really the hype machine that it is right now. I was this close to declining the invitation, but then I said, "Okay, I'll go for coffee. It doesn't hurt." And the first conversation was also not very promising, right?

Basically, Matt explained to me, "Hey, look, I know that you're positioning these optimization solutions to big corporations, and quantum computers will be able to solve these optimization problems in the future. Tell us how you talk to these corporate entities about what optimization can do, how you position the solutions, and how you get customers."

I started talking to them, but very quickly realized that they were talking about very small problems, right? I mean, 10 variables. In the beginning, it was incomprehensible to me that someone would try to set up a business where the biggest problem that can be solved is maybe five or 10 variables.

At the time, classical optimization could already solve problems with hundreds of thousands of variables, and those were the real problems that people wanted to solve. But then slowly, we had a few more discussions. I started reading up more on quantum computing, and it captured my imagination, the possibilities and all of that.

Then almost a year and a half, close to two years later, we talked about me potentially moving over to QC Ware to handle sales. By then, I had drunk the Kool-Aid and was happy to join.

Yuval: Excellent. So how can people get in touch with you to learn more about your work?

Yianni: Absolutely. My email is yianni.gamvros@qcware.com. You can reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn: Yianni Gamvros, or Y Gamvros, @ygamvros. Or you can submit an info request on QC Ware's info page. Those actually come to me, so you'll be reaching me directly if you just email info@qcware.com.

Yuval: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Yianni: Yuval, thank you so much for the very exciting and very interesting questions. Thanks.