The engagement was originated, not received. The proposal went up in December 2025, was accepted in January 2026, and the program started that February with a thirty-six-month term — a joint research engagement between NRI North America and the group’s parent company, built to prepare clients in both regions for the transition to quantum-resistant cryptography.
Why the commercial shape is part of the record
A technical proposal that crosses a corporate boundary stops being a technical proposal. This one ran across both companies’ leadership, with the transaction handled at chief-financial-officer level and managing directors on both sides — which is a different exercise from being assigned a research topic and given a budget line.
That is the part worth stating plainly, because the technical content is easy to describe and the origination is not. Somebody had to make the case that the problem was real, that the two organizations should carry it jointly rather than separately, and that thirty-six months was the right term for it — before any of the cryptography got done.
The technical position
Crypto-agility at scale is an inventory and mass-change problem before it is a cryptography problem. Knowing which algorithms are in use, where they are, and what depends on them is the hard part; replacing them is the part that has a vendor.
That framing decides what the work actually is: discovery and inventory of cryptographic assets across large estates, classification of what is found against replacement priority, and change-at-scale planning. AI was applied where the volume defeats manual review, which is most of it.
Where the inventory starts
On the wire. An estate’s own documentation says what cryptography it was designed to use; packet analysis says what it is actually negotiating, which is a different list and the only one that matters — the certificate nobody owns, the service still offering a cipher suite that was deprecated two refreshes ago, the appliance whose defaults were never changed.
So full packet capture is not instrumentation bolted onto this program. It is the first instrument a post-quantum architect picks up, and the reason a discipline that reads as pure cryptography rests on a platform bought sixteen years earlier for security forensics and root cause. The tool that answers what was on the wire is the tool that answers what cryptography is on the wire, and the second question is the whole inventory problem.
The environment it runs in is the practice lab — the same virtualized cluster carrying the orchestration proof of concept and pre-production design validation, which is why the lab was worth arguing for in the first place.
Specific client implementations sit under nondisclosure.
Having been on the receiving end
The relevant experience here is not only the packet capture platform that makes the inventory possible. It is a hash migration in 2014 that broke a live estate through its oldest endpoints and reached life-safety dispatch before it was contained.
Migrations do not fail on the cryptography. They fail on the oldest thing still on the network, and on nobody having an inventory of what that is.
Outcome
An intra-group research program with a term, a budget and a signature — brought into existence from a technical argument rather than handed down as a workstream.