D-Wave Announces NEC as a Global Reseller, the QuickStart Program as an Accelerator for Developer...

The D-Wave partnership with NEC extends an agreement that they reached two years ago in December 2019. At the time, NEC invested $10 million in D-Wave and agreed to collaborate in the areas of hybrid services, application development, and sales & marketing, particularly in Japan. NEC will now gradually expand their consulting and professional services to the 38 countries where D-Wave's Leap platform is available today. The arrangement will allow NEC's customers to access Leap view the cloud, purchase seats in D-Wave’s training courses, and leverage the utility of hybrid workflows with NEC's assistance.

Quickstart is a new program with a goal of providing Python developers the skills and knowledge to start building and running quantum applications within one week. It includes a week-long quantum training program to teach developers how D-Wave's quantum computers and hybrid solvers can be used to solve applications programs. It then follows that with providing the developer one month of unlimited usage of D-Wave's Advantage quantum computer and hybrid solver service.

Another development is PayPal's disclosure that they have been researching use of the D-Wave systems for financial applications, such as fraud detection. At the recent Q2B conference, D-Wave Vice-President Mark Johnson, was joined on-stage by Vidyut Naware, Director of AI Research at PayPal to describe how financial services and financial technology companies can gain business benefit from harnessing the power of quantum computing. Later on, Nitin Sharma, Technical Director of Research and Global Data Science at PayPal, described their research in a technical session on how they are experimenting the use of D-Wave quantum computer for use in fraud detection. This application is not yet close to a product level yet, but the research is still on-going.

For more about D-Wave's announcement that NEC has become a global reseller you can view the press release here. And for more about D-Wave's QuickStart program and their work with PayPal, you can view another press release here.