Utz Bacher is Vice President Software at Q.ANT, where he leads the development of the software ecosystem for Q.ANT’s photonic processors and drives the exploitation of photonic computing technology. After his studies in Information Technology, Utz spent more than 25 years in various business units at IBM. He started as a Linux kernel developer and team lead on various platforms, and has worked on firmware, virtualization, containerization and confidential computing technology architecture and development. Later, Utz moved into IBM’s services organization, shaping Cloud solutions and their delivery for client projects. In 2021, Utz joined IBM Quantum where he was the responsible architect for making IBM's quantum capabilities a Cloud Native service. He also designed the integration of client IT environments and HPC clusters from scientific compute centers with IBM Quantum. Utz joined Q.ANT in 2026.