Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions is now Bosch Global Software Technologies (BGSW), as a result of a strategic rebranding exercise undertaken to strengthen its software identity. “The change scripts a new narrative, culture and attitude in our innovative and software-driven world,” says Dattatri Salagame, CEO, president & managing director, Bosch Global Software Technologies. In a wide-ranging interview with Sudhir Chowdhary, he discusses the company’s expansion and growth plans, and initiatives to promote an innovation culture. Excerpts:

What is the idea and strategy behind the name change?
For the past 25 years, we have been known as Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions. We have grown in multiple dimensions in these years evolving into the largest technology centre for Bosch outside of Germany, having a footprint of product engineering for every business of Bosch. While the origin of the centre is India, we expanded our talent base to Vietnam, Mexico and Poland. This name change is an assertion to our partners, customers and the vibrant talent ecosystem. As a software company, we apply cutting edge software techniques to solve some of the most challenging problems across domains such as mobility, manufacturing, sustainability and consumer goods. This name change aptly represents the company’s identity, capabilities, competencies, global scale and the pivotal role it plays in product engineering at Bosch.

What are the initiatives undertaken as part of the rebranding?
The change scripts a new narrative, culture and attitude in our innovative and software-driven world. Our rebranding has three main pillars.

Strengthening our innovation focus with targeted investments: We recently inaugurated state-of-the-art Hacker’s Garage, an ‘innovation’ fund to promote an environment where promising ideas can be nurtured, incubated, and scaled. These centres will also be a collaborative ecosystem for startups, external companies and academia to participate in an environment of co-creation and co-innovation. Our DNA (Discover, Nurture, Align) startup incubation programme has seen its fifth cohort this year.

Leveraging global delivery networks with proximity to regional customers, to address the needs of complex systems: We are expanding our footprint in India— Our locations at Hyderabad and Pune will go live in Q1/2022 and subsequently we are expanding our presence to the northern part of the country. In Vietnam, we are opening a new centre in Hanoi. We are incubating a centre in Poland focusing on topics such as robotics and edge computing.

Nurturing best-in-class talent and enhancing capabilities to hone global technology leaders for the next techade: The development complements our hiring strategy as we look to recruit top software talent from premier universities to take on some of the most challenging requirements in domains of mobility, healthcare, sustainability and manufacturing. Driver assistance, autonomous driving, electric & software defined vehicles, healthcare screening, energy efficiency, factories of the future with considerations for hyperlocal scenarios, are some of the challenges the centre takes on.

What is the employee strength at BGSW? What are your hiring plans for 2022?
We currently have an employee base of 25,000 associates globally and plan to recruit about 5,500 associates in 2022 that includes talent from premier universities in AI, ML, cybersecurity, computer vision, and other new-age technologies.

What are the types of skills that you are looking for from new hires?
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, safety are some of the most challenging problems that our engineers work on. There are similar opportunities in healthcare, energy and other domains. Hence, we are looking at capabilities in data science, AI, cybersecurity, mechtronics, robotics, edge computing, hyperscale cloud development/deployment, full stack IoT to name a few. We would also be hiring experts with deep domain and systems knowledge especially in mobility.

What is BGSW’s expansion plans and focus for 2022?
We are looking at expanding beyond Bengaluru and Coimbatore to Hyderabad and Pune. We are targeting to hire 1000 people in both the centres in 2022. We are planning to expand our footprint to North and East India. We will also be continuing to expand to establish client-facing roles in the United States and Japan.

What are some of the challenges that are faced by the tech community presently?
Transitioning from traditional mobility to next-generation mobility will be a challenge from capability transformation perspective. Managing this transition is key. Additionally, while software is at the core of products—the complexity of systems will be much higher. There will be a significant need for integration between hardware and software, integration of ‘system of systems’ from a consortium of vendors. Managing this complexity, both from a skill standpoint and from an execution point of view, will be a big task.