$125 billion Honeywell took a giant step on its quantum computing journey by partnering with Microsoft. The company's quantum head says to expect much more.
- Quantum computing is still in its early stages, but Honeywell is preparing a big push to offer the advanced technology to industries including oil and gas, chemical, financial services, and pharmaceutical industries.
- The company is also partnering with Microsoft to give Azure customers access to its quantum computer, a sign that the technology is expanding beyond just academic settings.
- The market size for quantum "looks to be significant," according to Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions.
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Honeywell is betting big that quantum computing will be the technology of the future.
The company is partnering with Microsoft to give customers of its Azure platform access to Honeywell's quantum computer. It shows how the advanced technology goes beyond academic feuds and could soon be a critical aspect of an enterprise's overall IT strategy.
The discussions on the arrangement - which is non-exclusive, meaning Honeywell can partner with other cloud providers - were ongoing for over a year, according to Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions.
What attracted Honeywell to Microsoft was the ability to get "a global set of healthy users and customers out there who are interested in what quantum computing can do for them, as well as the idea of having this ability to co-process," he told Business Insider.
"There are classical resources that Azure is able to bring to bear at the same time that Honeywell can bring to bear," he added, referring to Microsoft's vast cloud computing services.
Quantum computing is complex, but essentially it is poised to allow organizations to run applications that currently may not even be feasible in a very short amount of time. That's because it effectively allows algorithms to scale at a significantly faster rate than the regular computers currently in use.
Today, for example, drug manufacturers have to test millions of different molecular behaviors in their quests to find new treatments. The bigger the molecule, the more computing that is required because the interactions are immensely greater, so much so that scientists are currently limited in the size in which they can analyze.
Quantum computing, however, will give researchers immense new capabilities to run tests with much larger molecules at a more rapid pace, ultimately cutting down on the timely and expensive drug development process.
And Honeywell - a sprawling conglomerate that sells a wide range of industrial products, including security systems and software solutions for the aviation sector and other industries - is going all in. The company plans to roll out even more quantum-based enterprise products within the next year and is talking to potential clients in the oil and gas, chemical, financial services, and pharmaceutical industries, Uttley says.
"The market size from all consideration looks to be significant and we want to make sure that we are directly shaping how that evolves," he said. "We have built ourselves to have a series of cascading offerings coming to market. We intentionally did that. This wasn't a one-and-done science project. We built this to be a business."
The partnership with Microsoft will greatly expand the reach of Honeywell's own quantum computer and allow companies to begin to test out how the technology could be used. This will also allow Microsoft to tell its clients that Azure features access to quantum computing.
Uttley, who is leading Honeywell's push in this space, outlined how companies should begin to think about quantum computing and who should lead the charge to harness the technology.
Organizations that don't invest in quantum 'have a very big risk of falling behind'
It's called "quantum" because the technology is built on a fundamental innovation to how computing calculation itself is done: rather than each bit being a 1 or a 0, the quantum bit is both at once. So instead of only being able to express two values, the "qubit" is all four at once. Hence "quantum," like quantum mechanics, where it's not uncommon for a particle to exist in more than one way.
The companies that should be contemplating how to fit quantum computing into their overall tech strategy fall into two buckets, according to Uttley.
The first are those who are prevented today from pursuing applications that could transform their business due to computational barriers. The second are those that face the potential for massive disruption due to quantum computing. The latter is where most of the attention is now among organizations, says Uttley.
"If this disruption happens and they're not on the front edge of it, they have a very big risk of falling behind and then not knowing how to catch up," he said. "And so even in this early stage, they're willing to invest to make sure that their company is up to speed, that they have technical people up to speed, and they know exactly where" in the business this is going to impact.
In the case of drug manufacturers, for example, quantum computing could lead to significant cost-savings and a faster process for bringing new treatments to market. Those who are slow to adopt it, however, risk falling behind other companies that are already making the investments.
Leading closest to the use-case
Quantum computing requires ample expertise, skill sets that Uttlley says many companies are currently lacking.
But finding that talent in a competitive market for tech workers is a major challenge - particularly as degrees in advanced physics, a background necessary to create the computers, fell by roughly 12 percent in 2018, according to the American Physical Society.
"These resources are very scarce in many cases that have been gobbled up," he said.
That's where Uttley argues companies like Honeywell - that have invested heavily in developing quantum capabilities - come into play. "We built up the capability, but we [also] have the domain expertise" in areas like oil, gas, and aerospace, he said.
Leading the efforts within the organization should be those closest to the actual use-case, argues Uttley. In a pharmaceutical company, that would be a chief research officer. Or if quantum computing is solving a logistics problem, then the supply chain leader or chief financial officer should manage it.
"The one who has the most impact to that particular [profit and loss] line-item is the one who has to be engaged," he said.