First Commercial Quantum Computing

Lots of claims in this space.   With large companies, Governments indicating their development    We dabbled very early on, providing problem areas of our interest.  IBM's involvement and investment does make a claim to seriousness.   And that its 'commercial' indication means that will lead to more testing on real world problems.   The article and quotes seem to waffle some about not yet 'being there', but soon.

IBM unveils its first commercial quantum computer
Frederic Lardinois   @fredericl in TechCrunch

At CES, IBM today announced its first commercial quantum computer for use outside of the lab. The 20-qubit system combines into a single package the quantum and classical computing parts it takes to use a machine like this for research and business applications. That package, the IBM Q system, is still huge, of course, but it includes everything a company would need to get started with its quantum computing experiments, including all the machinery necessary to cool the quantum computing hardware.

While IBM describes it as the first fully integrated universal quantum computing system designed for scientific and commercial use, it’s worth stressing that a 20-qubit machine is nowhere near powerful enough for most of the commercial applications that people envision for a quantum computer with more qubits — and qubits that are useful for more than 100 microseconds. It’s no surprise then, that IBM stresses that this is a first attempt and that the systems are “designed to one day tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical systems to handle.” Right now, we’re not quite there yet, but the company also notes that these systems are upgradable (and easy to maintain).  ... "