Long-time IoT analyst Sam Lucero joined Omdia in 2019, when Omdia acquired IHS Markit. He rose to the role of chief analyst, IoT technologies and services, before an interesting proposition was presented to him: launch and develop Omdia’s research program for quantum computing alongside the company’s quantum computing B2B media and events businesses.
Omdia has published standalone quantum computing research and reports under various research services: cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other groups since 2018 and has now consolidated and extended these efforts under Lucero into the Quantum Computing Intelligence Service research offering.
Calysto’s PR Vibes sat down with Lucero to discuss the new program, his role, and how he believes quantum computing has the potential to be an inflection point both in the industry and in society.
PR Vibes: How did this new group – and your new role – emerge?
Lucero: Quantum computing research and content was being produced by various analysts at Omdia, as well as in the form of conference event programming by our sister organization Informa Engage. At the end of 2021, we had enough feedback from clients that these efforts should really be a more dedicated focus for the company, with its own research program, conference series, and media site. So, starting in January, this has been my full-time area of coverage. The analysts who have produced quantum computing research for the company will stay in their “day jobs,” for example, in artificial intelligence, but will work closely with us on research where it makes sense.
Standing up a full research program also gives us a better ability to leverage the specialist research support teams at Omdia that have specific skill sets and knowledge in areas such as secondary data collection and management, using approaches such as web scraping, for example. Other specialist teams focus on the technical aspects of forecasting, and on primary research management, such as fielding and analyzing surveys, and so forth. Consolidating our quantum computing research into a full program gives us access to this expertise in a way that wasn’t available to the same extent for individual, standalone reports. So, it’s exciting to drive these opportunities to enhance and strengthen what we can offer our clients.
Adding to our existing portfolio of quantum computing research, we’ve recently introduced a quarterly market tracker, and we’ve published one survey looking at enterprise adopters’ attitudes and activities around quantum computing. We’re about to field another survey looking at attitudes and perceptions on the vendor side.
PR Vibes: They say it takes a village and that sounds like what is going on here?
Lucero: Exactly. There are also other research teams and programs focused on assessing technology trends in areas like manufacturing, enterprise IT, telecom, IoT, healthcare, semiconductors, and automotive. Quantum computing is potentially transformative across all these areas. So, it also is beneficial that we have subject matter experts in those areas that we can bring in as needed.
I’m working very closely with analysts in our cloud computing and enterprise IT teams, our AI team, and our semiconductor team. These guys have been focused on covering quantum as an adjacency, as an area of innovation in their core areas, and will continue to do so. And then, as I mentioned, there’s that larger set of people who bring other types of technical expertise to the conduct of research.
PR Vibes: You covered IoT for 17 years. What made this opportunity so interesting?
Lucero: I certainly was not looking to leave IoT or leave the team by any means. But when the opportunity arose in quantum, it was so interesting to me because it is a potentially transformational technology across a range of industries and societal needs. It potentially could deliver real solutions in the areas of, for instance, climate change, sustainability, and healthcare – this really has the potential for being an inflection point in so many areas of our society for the good.
Somewhat more personally, it’s just a very intrinsically interesting area of technology development, scientific development, in and of itself. And it’s just fascinating to see an area that has so much potential and is so different from classical computing technologies, everything from supercomputers to the smartphone.
PR Vibes: Who would your customers be?
Lucero: A lot of the client base initially will be the same types of clients we serve in other technology markets. Players who are interested in a range of different technology sectors and quantum now is on their radar. They need to make sure that they’re tracking events and participating and understanding what is going on. That forms a first layer of the customer base. The second layer will be the pure plays, the startups and scale ups that are active in quantum. A third layer is the enterprise adopters, because this is such a new area of exploration and learning.
PR Vibes: Where does the crossover come with IoT?
Lucero: Well, IoT is certainly one source of data that could potentially be utilized by quantum computing systems. Quantum computing is really an accelerator to classical computing systems as organizations want to take all of this IoT data that they’re generating or acquiring and bring it together with other forms of data and use it as the basis to understand more clearly what is happening. Quantum computing can allow that to be done more effectively, and so that’s where the link is most directly.
PR Vibes: What do you think will be the primary use cases and user personas?
Lucero: There are really three major areas that we see currently: quantum machine learning, complex optimization, and physical simulation. Quantum machine learning seems to be regarded as a kind of low-hanging fruit for many of these adopters in terms of what they want to explore. But the other two areas are certainly being explored as well, and each of those three areas break out into a huge multitude of applications. So, in the optimization space, for instance, transport logistics is a big focus. Optimization in the physical simulation space, you hear classically about improving new drug discovery, for instance. So, there’s lots of potential.
In terms of persona, there are several. It’s IT directors, people in R&D innovation, and those in data science. Those still typically tend to be point people on this, but the C-suite has brought this onto their radar screen, so this is not a technology that is still in the hinterlands. The senior leadership by and large is aware of quantum as a potential enabler and is increasingly on board with the idea that this needs to be explored very seriously by their organizations.
Many of these enterprises are not going to simply wait and settle for a fast follower strategy on this. They have stood up teams to directly look at this and engage with vendors. They have launched proof of concepts. They have secured executive buy-in.
PR Vibes: We’re facing a workplace shortage in just about every field. Ae there enough people working on this problem that it can scale quickly enough?
Lucero: Workforce availability and development are very, very key concerns in the ecosystem. We’re at the point of technology development now that a lot of the work is still at a fundamental research phase, meaning a large share of staffing opportunities require a Ph.D. in physics. There’s space and opportunity for people who have strong technical backgrounds as quantum computing engineers and programmers who can contribute to the development of solutions. But we’re at a really fundamental level of technology development still, and there’s simply not enough people who have the kind of education and experience that’s needed.
Quantum computing is front and center on the minds of adopters, the vendor community, and governments. So, governments are helping to invest in quantum computing, ecosystems and paths to education and resources to support education in their respective areas and domains. The more prominent quantum computing and quantum technology becomes, the more people will be drawn into that as an area of study, just as we’ve seen with AI, for instance. But it’s a work in progress.
PR Vibes: What’s the timeframe?
Lucero: We’re clearly at a very early stage of development. Anecdotally, stakeholders suggest that the inflection point to where we reach what’s called Quantum Advantage across several different use cases and application areas range mostly between 2027 and 2030.
You can almost think of it like a normal distribution curve: you have some who think 2025, but they’re very much in the minority. You get to 2027 and the timeframe starts to seem more reasonable to a wider share of stakeholders. When you get to 2028, 2029, 2030, people become more optimistic. And there are those on the other end of the tail who think we’re still 15 to 20 years away. Most of the people that we have talked to and most of the research that we’ve done suggests that we do have reason to be optimistic.