Bosch, a German-based multinational engineering and automotive technology firm, chose India to set up its largest technology centre outside of Germany a quarter century ago. Since then, India has been bringing growth in multiple dimensions and is now all set to continue to spearhead Bosch’s digitisation and innovation activities globally, said Dattatri Salagame, CEO, president and MD, Bosch Global Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (BGSW) in an exclusive interaction with The Hindu. Edited excerpts:
What is the rationale behind Bosch’s (RBEI) recent global name change?
We have recently changed our name globally from Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) to Bosch Global Software Technologies (BGSW). The new name captures our technological and business advancements and portrays our ability to build ‘Fit for Future’ technology products and services. As a software company, we apply cutting-edge techniques to solve some of the most challenging problems across domains such as mobility, manufacturing, sustainability, and consumer goods. We want to communicate with and invite the bright talent ecosystems and innovation hubs to join us. This name change aptly represents the company’s identity, capabilities, competencies, global scale and the pivotal role it plays in product engineering at Bosch.
Will this new branding sharpen Bosch’s focus on digital technology and innovation?
Bosch is constantly striving to bring the best of technology-led innovations to business. Increased maturity and adoption of data-driven technologies, distributed, cloud and edge computing spawn opportunities to innovate more. Last year, we created an exclusive unit, Software & Digital Solutions to focus on a portfolio of connected enterprises and connected products. We believe that the future of mobility will be software defined. Additionally, we are also looking to strengthen our innovation focus at BGSW with targeted investments. We recently inaugurated Hacker’s Garage, also an innovation fund to promote an environment where promising ideas can be nurtured, incubated and scaled.
How will AIShield ensure additional cover of security in a highly cyber- threatened environment?
It is an industry-first and patented AI Security SaaS offering which brings hacker-level vulnerability assessment and security hardening by custom endpoint defences to the organisation’s AI-powered devices and cloud solutions. We realised the need to create a last layer of defence for AI models to plug in the newer attack surfaces and security threats. The idea of Bosch AIShield was born in 2020 and the solution was unveiled at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2022 in Las Vegas. We all know organisations are trying hard to protect their valuable digital assets like data and information. Exploitation of AI can also lead to financial losses, reputational damage, loss of competitive advantage, and loss of intellectual property for enterprises. With AIShield’s end-to-end security offering, even small security teams and AI/ML developers can ensure AI systems are monitored and protected.
How critical is India for Bosch globally in terms of software/product development and R&D?
India is the largest software and technology centre for Bosch outside of Germany. While BGSW is headquartered in Bengaluru, it caters to customers and partners across geographies and industries in their digitalisation journey. Targeted investments reflect in our infrastructure ramp-ups, innovation labs, national expansion plans and also talent upskilling. Our start-up incubation programme — DNA (Discover, Nurture, Align) — and the innovation labs such as Hacker’s Garage, IoT Garage etc. further boost innovation. Our work involves the application of electronics and computation to solve domain problems. For example, in mobility — autonomous driving, vehicle computing, gateways, V2X (vehicle-to-anything) —, connectivity, electrification and safety are some of the most challenging problems that our engineers work on.
In healthcare, BGSW is focused on products, solutions to bring detection of anomalies in blood anatomy, hemoglobin-based sensing in a digital non-invasive way using computer vision and allied data technologies. There are similar opportunities that we work on in energy, enterprise digitalisation and other domains.
What about your hiring plans?
We will be hiring around 5,500 professionals in 2022, to add to our existing employee base of 25, 000. We are scouting for talent that have a deep understanding of technology and an ability to solve real-time problems. Hence, we are looking at capabilities in Data science, AI, Cybersecurity, Mechatronics, Robotics, Edge computing, Hyperscale Cloud development/deployment and full stack IoT to name a few. We would also be hiring experts with deep domain and systems knowledge, especially in mobility. BGSW would play a major role in digital transformation of Bosch globally and hence, we would be keen to engage talent with proven enterprise digital-transformation competencies.
When are your Hyderabad and Pune centres expected to be operational?
In India, we are expanding beyond Coimbatore and Bengaluru to include Hyderabad and Pune which will be operational in mid-2022. To start with, we will be hiring around 1,000 professionals this year for these two new centres and ramp up these to 5,000 professionals by 2025. We are planning to expand our footprint to North and East India as well. Also, we are opening a new centre in North Vietnam at Hanoi and looking at hiring 400 people this year. We are incubating a centre in Poland. We will also be continuing to expand client-facing roles in the U.S and Japan.
