News

Splunk Partners with Quantum Computing, Inc.

• By John K. Waters
• March 24, 2020

Quantum Computing, Inc. (QCI), which develops "quantum ready software," is partnering with data search and analytics solution provider Splunk, the two companies announced today, to pursue "fundamental and applied research" and develop advanced analytics capabilities that will exploit the strengths of both companies.

QCI has experience developing applications and tools for early quantum computers. The company focuses on abstractions that "free application developers to focus on the vital task of mapping problems to appropriate quantum computing (QC) forms by obscuring hardware-specific details."

Splunk brings a leading big-data-analytics platform to the partnership. Its Data-to-Everything platform is designed to investigate, monitor, analyze, and act on data at any scale, from any source over any time period. It "turns data into doing," the company says. Of particular interest to QCI: the capabilities of Splunk's machine/deep learning toolkit, currently used by Splunk customers. 

Specially, the two companies entered into this "technology alliance partnership agreement" to develop analytics that exploit conventional large-data cybersecurity stores and data-analytics workflows, and combine those capabilities with quantum-ready graph and constrained-optimization algorithms.

These algorithms will initially be developed using QCI's Mukai software platform, the company said, which is designed to enable quantum-ready algorithms to execute on classical hardware, and also to run without modification on QC hardware (when ready). Once proofs of concept are completed, QCI and Splunk will develop new analytics with these algorithms in the Splunk data-analytics platform, to evaluate quantum analytics readiness on real-world data. The Splunk platform/toolkits help customers address challenging analytical problems via neural nets or custom algorithms, extensible to deep learning frameworks through an open source approach that incorporates existing and custom libraries. 

Initially, the partnership will focus on three key challenges: network security, dynamic logistics and scheduling.