Challenge
A ministry responsible for science, technology and digital infrastructure in a mid-sized country was preparing to make its first major quantum computing investment. The national quantum strategy, approved two years earlier, had identified on-premises quantum computing capability as a priority — both for national research competitiveness and as a foundation for future defence and industrial applications. Budget had been allocated, and the ministry’s procurement team had begun drafting an RFP.
The initial RFP was modelled on how the country had historically procured large-scale scientific instruments and HPC systems: identify the leading vendors, specify performance requirements, evaluate proposals on capability and price, and buy the best available system. In practice, this meant the procurement was converging on a monolithic quantum computer from one of the major vertically integrated vendors — a single machine with QPU, control electronics, cryogenics, and software all supplied as a sealed package by one company. Several vendors had already been in contact with the ministry, presenting roadmaps, qubit counts, and performance benchmarks. A draft business case had been prepared around this approach, projecting costs, timelines, and expected research output.
On the surface, this looked like a well-managed procurement. But the ministry’s chief technology advisor raised a set of concerns that the procurement team had not fully considered.
First, a monolithic system from a single vendor would create a deep, long-term dependency. The ministry would be locked into that vendor’s hardware roadmap, software ecosystem, and pricing decisions for the lifetime of the system — likely a decade or more. If the vendor’s technology fell behind competitors, or if the vendor changed its commercial strategy (as had happened with several classical HPC vendors), the ministry would have no practical alternative short of starting over.
Second, the geopolitical dimension was increasingly relevant. All of the leading quantum computer vendors were headquartered in a small number of countries. Export control regimes were tightening. The ministry’s own government had recently published a technology sovereignty framework emphasising the need to reduce critical dependencies on foreign suppliers in strategic technology areas. A procurement that deepened dependence on a single foreign vendor sat uncomfortably with that framework.
Third, the ministry’s researchers and engineers had limited hands-on experience with quantum computing. The draft RFP specified performance metrics drawn largely from vendor materials and academic papers, but the procurement team acknowledged privately that they were not confident they were asking for the right things — or that they would be able to evaluate the responses with the rigour the investment required.
The ministry’s question was not whether to invest in quantum computing — that decision was made. The question was whether they were about to spend a very large sum on a procurement that might deliver the wrong system, from a single vendor, on terms that would constrain the programme for years. They engaged Applied Quantum to advise.
How Applied Quantum Helped
We were engaged to review the draft RFP and business case, advise on procurement strategy, and help the ministry build the internal capability needed to make a well-informed investment decision — whether that ultimately meant buying a monolithic system, building a quantum computer from open-architecture components, or some hybrid approach.
Procurement Review and Gap Analysis
We began by reviewing the draft RFP, the business case, and the vendor materials the ministry had received. Our assessment identified several significant gaps.
The RFP’s performance specifications were drawn primarily from vendor-supplied metrics — qubit counts, quantum volume, and gate fidelities — without clear linkage to the research problems the ministry’s scientists actually needed to solve. We found that the draft requirements would produce a system optimised for benchmark performance rather than for the specific workloads (materials simulation, optimisation, and quantum chemistry) that the national research community had identified as priorities. In some cases, the metrics favoured one vendor’s architecture over others for reasons that had no bearing on the ministry’s actual use cases.
The RFP contained no provisions for supply chain transparency, source code access for the software stack, or the ability to upgrade individual components independently. It would have produced a system where the ministry owned the hardware but had no control over — and limited visibility into — the software that operated it. Firmware updates, calibration routines, and even basic system management would depend on the vendor’s ongoing cooperation and commercial decisions.
The business case assumed a single procurement event followed by a fixed operational period, with no modelling of upgrade paths, component replacement costs, or the implications of being locked into one vendor’s technology trajectory as the field evolved rapidly. Given that QPU performance was improving significantly year-over-year across multiple vendors, a system procured today under these terms would likely be outpaced within a few years, with no practical upgrade path short of a full replacement.
We also noted that none of the vendors being considered had been asked about open interfaces, component-level replaceability, or interoperability with third-party control electronics or software — questions that would have been standard in a classical IT infrastructure procurement but were absent from the quantum RFP.
Recommendation: Pause, Build Capability, Then Procure Better
Our central recommendation was that the ministry was not yet ready to make this procurement well, and that proceeding on the current trajectory risked a suboptimal outcome that would constrain the programme for years. We recommended a structured pause — not abandoning the procurement, but investing six to twelve months in building the internal capability and market understanding needed to run a significantly better process.
Specifically, we recommended three parallel workstreams:
The first was a quantum skills and experience programme for the ministry’s researchers and engineers. We designed a programme that combined cloud-based quantum computing access (through IBM Quantum, Amazon Braket, and other platforms) with structured experimentation: researchers would run their actual target workloads on cloud quantum hardware, gaining hands-on experience with real systems, real noise, real limitations, and the practical differences between vendors’ platforms. This was not generic training — it was designed so that by the end of the programme, the ministry’s scientists would have first-hand data on how different quantum architectures performed on their specific problems. That experience would directly inform the requirements in the refreshed RFP.
The second workstream was a technology landscape assessment covering the full range of procurement options — not just the monolithic systems the original RFP had targeted. We provided the ministry with a structured analysis of the Quantum Open Architecture movement and the emerging ecosystem of modular quantum components: off-the-shelf QPUs from companies like QuantWare, control electronics from Qblox and Quantum Machines, cryogenic systems from Bluefors and other suppliers, and the integration approaches being used by institutions such as the University of Naples to assemble quantum computers from these components. We assessed the maturity, cost, performance, and sovereignty implications of this approach compared to monolithic systems — giving the ministry a genuine apples-to-apples comparison it had never had.
We also analysed hybrid options: for example, procuring a monolithic system for immediate use while simultaneously investing in domestic systems integration capability that could assemble a second, open-architecture system within two to three years — giving the programme both near-term access and long-term sovereign optionality.
The third workstream was a procurement framework redesign. We worked with the ministry’s procurement team to redesign the RFI and RFP structure so that the refreshed process would evaluate all credible approaches on equal footing. The new RFI was designed to elicit information that the original process would never have captured: what interfaces are open versus proprietary, what source code is provided versus withheld, what components can be independently upgraded or replaced, what the vendor’s export control exposure is, what happens if the vendor exits the market or is acquired, and what the total cost of ownership looks like under different upgrade and expansion scenarios. We also helped the ministry define evaluation criteria that weighted sovereign optionality, upgrade flexibility, and total lifecycle cost alongside raw performance — reflecting the government’s broader technology sovereignty framework.
Ongoing Support
Throughout this period, we provided ongoing advisory support: helping the ministry’s researchers interpret their cloud experimentation results, answering technical questions from the procurement team as they developed the refreshed RFI, and connecting the ministry with institutions and companies in the QOA ecosystem so they could conduct their own due diligence on the open-architecture approach.
Outcome
The ministry paused the original procurement and invested in the capability-building programme we recommended. Within six months, the impact on the programme’s readiness was substantial.
The cloud experimentation programme gave the ministry’s researchers direct, hands-on experience with quantum hardware from multiple vendors for the first time. Several research groups reported that the exercise fundamentally changed their understanding of what current quantum systems could and could not do — and, critically, that the performance differences between platforms varied significantly depending on the specific problem being run. This insight alone would reshape the refreshed RFP: instead of specifying generic benchmark performance, the ministry could now specify requirements grounded in actual workload data from their own scientists.
The technology landscape assessment opened a conversation that had not previously existed within the ministry. Before our engagement, the procurement team had assumed that buying a quantum computer meant buying a monolithic system from a major vendor — because that was the only model they had encountered. The assessment introduced the open-architecture alternative as a credible, costed option, and the hybrid approach as a pragmatic middle path. Several senior officials expressed surprise at the cost differential: a QOA-based system with comparable qubit count and connectivity could potentially be delivered at a fraction of the cost of a monolithic equivalent, with the added advantage of component-level upgradeability.
As of the time of writing, the ministry is preparing the refreshed RFI and RFP based on the new procurement framework and the insights from the cloud experimentation programme. The new process is designed to draw responses from both traditional monolithic vendors and from systems integration firms proposing open-architecture builds — a competitive dynamic that would not have existed under the original process. The revised questions will require vendors to disclose information about interfaces, software control, upgrade paths, and supply chain dependencies that the original RFP would never have captured.
The eventual decision — monolithic, open-architecture, or hybrid — has not yet been made, and we are not prescribing the answer. What has changed is the quality of the decision the ministry is about to make. The ministry now understands the full range of options, has first-hand performance data from its own researchers, can evaluate proposals against sovereignty and lifecycle criteria as well as raw performance, and has a procurement framework designed to produce a system the programme can live with for a decade rather than regret within three years.
The ministry’s chief technology advisor summarised the outcome simply: they were about to spend a significant sum on a quantum computer they did not fully understand, from a vendor they could not easily leave, on terms that would limit their options for years. Now they are making the same investment with open eyes — and the result, whatever they choose, will be a better system on better terms.