HCL Technologies, a domestically based information technology (IT) facilities company, made the announcement on Monday that it had reached a partnership arrangement with Azure Quantum, Microsoft’s quantum cloud computing service. HCLTech will offer its customers cloud-based quantum computing services, and it will do so by utilising the platform developed by Microsoft as the foundation of its technical stack. HCLTech’s Q-Labs, one of Microsoft’s partners that has in the past delivered Azure Quantum credits, will be the entity that is responsible for providing the aforementioned services.
As part of this collaboration, HCLTech’s Q-Labs will develop on-cloud instances of quantum technologies and will present proof of concept (PoC) business use cases to the organization’s customers. According to Linda Lauw, senior director of Microsoft’s Azure Quantum Planning and Partnerships, an early phase of the partnership between Microsoft and HCLTech Q-Lab has seen “impressive engagement” from “introducing enterprises to quantum computing foundations and applications explorable right not through PoC pilots.” In other words, the PoC pilots have allowed for enterprises to begin experimenting with quantum computing.
According to a statement released by the firm, the Q-Labs division of HCLTech is also responsible for the incubation of early-stage research programmes that aim to build industrial quantum computing applications. As part of its collaboration with Microsoft, Q-Lab will make its cloud service for quantum computing available to “near to 1,000 employees around the world” in order to facilitate the creation of use cases of this kind.
Cloud-based services such as IBM’s Quantum, Google’s ‘Cirq’ quantum computing service, and Microsoft’s Azure Quantum are three of the most famous examples of cloud-based services that provide organisations with access to quantum hardware over the cloud. Each of these businesses is making baby steps forward in the direction of bringing quantum computing services into the mainstream of commercial operations.
IBM Quantum made the announcement of its partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in September of the previous year. Through this collaboration, IBM Quantum will provide IIT Madras students with access to its quantum hardware in order to facilitate the development of algorithms, applications, and skill sets among engineers.
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Google, announced on February 22 that a team of researchers at the company had been successful in developing ‘logical qubits,’ which are larger fundamental building blocks of quantum computing, and using the same to reduce the number of computational errors made by quantum computers. The latter requires a particular set of parameters in order for its core computing factor, qubits, to work at their quantum state. In order to accomplish this, a quantum computer must be constructed. The researchers believe that they have improved the reliability of quantum calculations by combining 47 qubits into a larger single entity. This is a step towards the goal of making quantum computers suitable for use in commercial settings.
