IonQ, Inc. (NYSE:IONQ) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Quinn Bolton: Excellent. Thank you very much.

Peter Chapman: Thank you.

Operator: And our next question comes from David Williams from Benchmark. Please go ahead with your question.

David Williams: Hey, good evening and congrats on the progress, definitely great to see.

Peter Chapman: Thanks David.

David Williams: I guess Peter for you first and you talk a little bit about the manufacturing of systems and just wondering if you could kind of talk maybe through your software stack and how you’re thinking about kind of the, from the user perspective and how you’re simplifying that process. If you have the machine, clearly you’re going to have to need to how to run it. So what are you doing on that front and any developments there?

Peter Chapman: Well it’s on multiple fronts. So on one hand the acquisition that we just did was in terms of the compiler itself that allows people to run more complicated applications on existing work, taking better advantage of the hardware itself, and that’s one of the reasons that we did it. There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of kind of making quantum available to what I would say is kind of average developers or line of business developer, and that’s still work ahead of us. Today people program in quantum logic gates and I don’t think that that’s the way that people will be programming in quantum five years from now. So it is an area of active interest for us. You can see things to that might be kind of breadcrumbs you’re seeing even in kind of classical software development companies like OpenAI, which are doing automatic code generation. I would hope that those are the kinds of things that come to quantum in the future.

David Williams: Okay very helpful. And one thing I wanted to ask about is that the Dell partnership that you announced, I believe it was last quarter, but we were surprised at Super Compute this year, just kind of seeing that that on display and the kiosk that Dell dedicated to that. Just wondering if there’s any update there or if you can give us any further color on that relationship and kind of how you’re thinking about that and how that really drives the business you think over the next several years?

Peter Chapman: Well as you probably saw and continue to hear from Dell that they think that the combination of quantum and classical is kind of the future. And so they €“ we’ve been working with them on the software and also the hardware integration between the two companies so that you can use classical Dell hardware with IonQ quantum hardware. And so but also from a company point of view, it gives us access to Dell’s kind of sales force so that they can sell quantum as well and it’s still early days but we’ve been doing things like training the Dell’s sales force about quantum so that they can help sell quantum to their customers as well. So we expect that partnership to continue to grow over the next several years.

David Williams: Okay, fantastic. And then maybe just from the, the annual bookings guide, it was a bit better than we had anticipated and the revenue as well. But just if you could kind of talk us through what are the areas or applications you’re seeing the greatest traction? You mentioned QML; can you kind of quantify the demand relative maybe some of the other areas and what you’re seeing in terms of commercial adoption in those areas?