The Role of Technology Vendors in Your Quantum-Safe Migration

October 24, 2023

Who is responsible for migrating your systems to quantum-safe algorithms? Is it your vendors or your cybersecurity team?  

The customers I speak to are not always clear on this question. But from my perspective, the answer is your cybersecurity team. They have the ultimate responsibility of ensuring your organization is secure in a post-quantum future. However, they will need a lot of help from your technology vendors.

This article outlines what you should expect (or demand) from your vendors, and what remains the responsibility of your cyber team.

What To Expect From General Vendors

A general vendor does not offer specific cryptographic services to you. Instead, they provide a business service that uses cryptography to maintain security and resilience.

Consider the accounting platform SAP. It is no doubt riddled with cryptography, yet its purpose is to manage your finances. Therefore, SAP’s focus will be on migrating their underlying cryptography to post-quantum technologies, while maintaining your business services without interruption.

You should expect a general vendor to share a quantum-safe migration roadmap with you, complete with timelines. They should explain the activities they will complete to address the quantum threat, and how they will impact you as a user.

Although your vendor will not begin migration until the NIST post-quantum algorithms are standardised next year, you should expect them to already have a roadmap in place. If they don’t, this is a cause for concern.

Some vendors may already offer a test version of their product, which uses post-quantum algorithms. This allows your cyber team to experiment with the impact on performance or interoperability.

What To Expect From Cryptographic Vendors

A cryptographic vendor provides you with services directly related to cryptography, such as network security, data encryption or key management.

The expectations that apply to general vendors also apply to cryptographic vendors. However, you will need more information from your cryptographic vendors to pull off a smooth migration.

Cryptographic vendors must provide you with detailed guidance on how to migrate between their current product suite and the new versions that use post-quantum algorithms. For instance, you might need to understand how to re-process legacy data so that it’s protected by the new algorithms. Similarly, network security vendors will need to provide detailed instructions on migrating traffic flows while maintaining uptime.

I would expect cryptographic vendors to be far more hands-on during your migration. Expect to have discussions of your deployment architecture with their account management teams, and don’t be afraid to ask the hard technical questions.

What Information You Should be Ready to Share

The flow of information will not be one-way. You should be prepared to share information with your vendors to help them help you.

Having your migration plan developed, at least at a high level, will be critical for meaningful conversations with your vendors. This will allow you to contrast their timelines for migration versus your expectations.

Vendors will also benefit from understanding how you use their products in conjunction with products from other vendors. The goal here is to spot edge cases, where you risk business downtime because the vendor wasn’t anticipating how you were using their product.

Finally, make sure you know the configuration of your deployment. The devil is in the details when it comes to planning migration, so be prepared to tell your vendor which features you are using and how you’ve configured product security settings.

What is Out of Scope for Your Vendor?

While your vendors should provide a lot of help and guidance, they are not responsible for everything.

Your cybersecurity team will be responsible for planning your overall migration strategy, including prioritising which systems to migrate first. This will involve understanding the relative importance of business systems, and the requirements for data security.

While vendors should provide some guidance for interoperability, ultimately the IT and cybersecurity teams are responsible for ensuring updates to one service do not impact another service.

Finally, you must ensure your IT and cyber teams are leading the conversation with your end users. You cannot rely on vendors to manage the communication with your customers and internal stakeholders.

What Should You Expect to See Today?

A good vendor will already be talking to you about their plans for quantum-safe migration.

For mass-market products, this might be via blog posts and thought-leadership articles. For products with a deeper client/vendor relationship, the topic of quantum-safe migration should already be appearing in quarterly business reviews.

For cryptographic vendors, you should also be expecting test versions to be available today, to allow for experimentation.

Overall, if any vendor is not able to talk about their plans for quantum-safe migration today, even at a high level, then you should flag this as a cause for concern.

About Quantinuum

Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents. 

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If we are to create ‘next-gen’ AI that takes full advantage of the power of quantum computers, we need to start with quantum native transformers. Today we announce yet again that Quantinuum continues to lead by demonstrating concrete progress — advancing from theoretical models to real quantum deployment.

The future of AI won't be built on yesterday’s tech. If we're serious about creating next-generation AI that unlocks the full promise of quantum computing, then we must build quantum-native models—designed for quantum, from the ground up.

Around this time last year, we introduced Quixer, a state-of-the-art quantum-native transformer. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a major milestone: one year on, Quixer is now running natively on quantum hardware.

Why this matters: Quantum AI, born native

This marks a turning point for the industry: realizing quantum-native AI opens a world of possibilities.

Classical transformers revolutionized AI. They power everything from ChatGPT to real-time translation, computer vision, drug discovery, and algorithmic trading. Now, Quixer sets the stage for a similar leap — but for quantum-native computation. Because quantum computers differ fundamentally from classical computers, we expect a whole new host of valuable applications to emerge.  

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That’s what we’ve built.

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Until Quixer, quantum transformers were the result of a brute force “copy-paste” approach: taking the math from a classical model and putting it onto a quantum circuit. However, this approach does not account for the considerable differences between quantum and classical architectures, leading to substantial resource requirements.

Quixer is different: it’s not a translation – it's an innovation.

With Quixer, our team introduced an explicitly quantum transformer, built from the ground up using quantum algorithmic primitives. Because Quixer is tailored for quantum circuits, it's more resource efficient than most competing approaches.

As quantum computing advances toward fault tolerance, Quixer is built to scale with it.

What’s next for Quixer?

We’ve already deployed Quixer on real-world data: genomic sequence analysis, a high-impact classification task in biotech. We're happy to report that its performance is already approaching that of classical models, even in this first implementation.

This is just the beginning.

Looking ahead, we’ll explore using Quixer anywhere classical transformers have proven to be useful; such as language modeling, image classification, quantum chemistry, and beyond. More excitingly, we expect use cases to emerge that are quantum-specific, impossible on classical hardware.

This milestone isn’t just about one model. It’s a signal that the quantum AI era has begun, and that Quantinuum is leading the charge with real results, not empty hype.

Stay tuned. The revolution is only getting started.

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June 9, 2025
Join us at ISC25

Our team is participating in ISC High Performance 2025 (ISC 2025) from June 10-13 in Hamburg, Germany!

As quantum computing accelerates, so does the urgency to integrate its capabilities into today’s high-performance computing (HPC) and AI environments. At ISC 2025, meet the Quantinuum team to learn how the highest performing quantum systems on the market, combined with advanced software and powerful collaborations, are helping organizations take the next step in their compute strategy.

Quantinuum is leading the industry across every major vector: performance, hybrid integration, scientific innovation, global collaboration and ease of access.

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  • We are advancing real-world hybrid compute with partners such as RIKEN, NVIDIA, SoftBank, STFC Hartree Center and are pioneering applications such as our own GenQAI framework.
Exhibit Hall

From June 10–13, in Hamburg, Germany, visit us at Booth B40 in the Exhibition Hall or attend one of our technical talks to explore how our quantum technologies are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible across HPC.

Presentations & Demos

Throughout ISC, our team will present on the most important topics in HPC and quantum computing integration—from near-term hybrid use cases to hardware innovations and future roadmaps.

Multicore World Networking Event

  • Monday, June 9 | 7:00pm – 9:00 PM at Hofbräu Wirtshaus Esplanade
    In partnership with Multicore World, join us for a Quantinuum-sponsored Happy Hour to explore the present and future of quantum computing with Quantinuum CCO, Dr. Nash Palaniswamy, and network with our team.
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H1 x CUDA-Q Demonstration

  • All Week at Booth B40
    We’re showcasing a live demonstration of NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform running on Quantinuum’s industry-leading quantum hardware. This new integration paves the way for hybrid compute solutions in optimization, AI, and chemistry.
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HPC Solutions Forum

  • Wednesday, June 11 | 2:20 – 2:40 PM
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See You There!

Whether you're exploring hybrid solutions today or planning for large-scale quantum deployment tomorrow, ISC 2025 is the place to begin the conversation.

We look forward to seeing you in Hamburg!

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Last year, we published a paper in Science demonstrating the first-ever fault-tolerant teleportation of a logical qubit. At the time, we outlined how crucial teleportation is to realize large-scale fault tolerant quantum computers. Given the high degree of system performance and capabilities required to run the protocol (e.g., multiple qubits, high-fidelity state-preparation, entangling operations, mid-circuit measurement, etc.), teleportation is recognized as an excellent measure of system maturity.

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Figure 1: Fidelity of two-bit state teleportation for physical qubit experiments and logical qubit experiments using the d=3 color code (Steane code). The same QASM programs that were ran during March 2024 on the Quantinuum's H2-1 device were reran on the same device on April to March 2025. Thanks to the improvements made to H2-1 from 2024 to 2025, physical error rates have been reduced leading to increased fidelity for both the physical and logical level teleportation experiments. The results imply a logical error rate that is 2.3 times smaller than the physical error rate while being statistically well separated, thus indicating the logical fidelities are below break-even for teleportation.

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