Interview with Octave Klaba

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me over at your event.

So, yeah, you're right that we co-created this event and we are really proud of that. We started to work on quantum in 2021, even a little bit before, because we felt that it is the next revolution. And specifically when you work in cloud, you want the latest technologies and to offer that to our customers. So there we discovered that there were different quantum areas and expertises. One of them is of course quantum computers and there was another, securities. So this is why we started to work on that.

Then in 2021 we created the startup program to integrate the ecosystem. I have a small list: in 2022, first quantum emulators with QLM, Atos, IQM. That was it. Then in 2023, two additional emulators: IonQ and C12. And also we decided to invest in a real computer because there was one from Quandela available on the market, but we found that we can do things with that already. And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later. Then in 2023/24, three emulators: Alice and Bob, Pasqal, and Kisskit. And last year and this year, two additional emulators: Kobi and QPerfect. So now we have eight emulators in our cloud. Last year, 2,000 projects that were run with students, researchers, different people that we are trying to really support and be this ecosystem partner.

Yeah, you're right that OVH is a technology company. We love technologies and here there was something new that we wanted to discover. But you also know what we find: there will probably not be just one winner. There will be different kinds of computers because the technologies behind them are so different. They are not working for the same kind of use cases. And this is why we wanted to really understand very quickly but also be a partner in the ecosystem. The question that I asked my team is really: how can we help the ecosystem to grow? What kind of place OVH Cloud has to play so that the ecosystem can grow faster? What should we do so that the ecosystem has customers, makes revenue, and is sustainable on the long term?

Oh, you know, we started to use this computer, for example, for security reasons.

Because we, you know, when you create SSL certificates, you need entropy, okay? And we find that Quandela computers can generate random numbers that are more random than classical computers. 70% of the randomness you can take from a classical computer, and quantum, 85%. So wow, 85 is better, let's have this computer. So we bought that. We also bought this computer because, you know, I was on stage about three years ago saying when your company is making 1 billion in revenue per year, you should invest 1 million. Actually, we are making 1 billion. So it's our time also to invest in real computers and also invest in the same way that we ask the ecosystem to do. So this is what we've done with this computer. We are really proud because now it works. We plan to generate about 1 million certificates this year and the goal is to go up to 15 million certificates per year.