On December 7th and 8th, the PlanQK consortium met again in Berlin. In addition to an intensive exchange within the framework of the consortium meeting, the PlanQK annual meeting was held for the first time, to which representatives from politics, research and industry were invited to receive a presentation of the current development status of PlanQK and to discuss cooperation potentials.
As host, DB Systel once again provided optimal premises for the consortium meeting, so that the approximately 70 participants were able to participate well both on site and online. The first day was initially about marketing and communication. PlanQK Community Manager David Niehaus gave an overview of the activities in 2022 as well as the planning for 2023. 2022 highlights included the appearance at the Days of Digital Technologies, as well as the various PlanQK Industry Days. Numerous events are also already on track for 2023. For example, PlanQK will present itself at the World of Quantum and plans to be present again at the Hannover Messe. The discussion also generated ideas for new formats, such as participation in meetings of industry consortia to make PlanQK known beyond the circle of consortium partners and associated partners. In the future, PlanQK will also be regularly on the agenda for events at the Digital Technologies Forum in Berlin, which was created by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK). In addition, a permanently installed exhibit of the platform will illustrate the enormous potential of quantum applications for Germany, but also international companies and organizations, based on use cases.
In addition to marketing and communication, the focus was of course on the status of the development of the platform and use cases. Michael Falkenthal from the platform developer StoneOne/Anaqor reported on progress and initial experiences with the open beta version, which is already being tested by around 300 users. Above all, the knowledge platform is already at a good usable level and must now be continuously expanded with further associated partners or knowledge artifacts. An important point was the access to the hardware, here are still a few cliffs to take.
On the first day, the consortium meeting moved almost seamlessly to the annual meeting in the impressive premises of the Academy of Sciences in the heart of Berlin. The goal of the event was to present the current development status of PlanQK to guests from politics, industry, research institutions and other interested organizations and, above all, to discuss further concrete cooperations. At the beginning, Axel Voss, head of department at the BMWK, emphasized in his welcome speech the high importance of PlanQK from the point of view of the Federal Government for the development of Germany as a business location and signaled further support for this QC lighthouse project. The increasing anchoring of PlanQK in the European context is also gratifying. The PlanQK platform was included in the Strategic Industry Roadmap SIR of the European Quantum Industry Consortium QuIC in 2022. From the practical side, Marie Salm from the University of Stuttgart told the guests how PlanQK can be used to provide research prototypes such as the NISQ analyzer and what benefits arise from this for developers and users. Manfred Rieck from DB Systel, Daniel Herr from d-fine and Daniel Jaroszewski from Frankfurt Consulting Engineers reported on the status of their respective use cases, representing the more than 30 use cases worked on by all consortium partners.
