1980s-90sSoftware eats the other industries. Media went first, then banking, finance and insurance, and Salagame remembers people hating the software industry for it. His point in retelling it is that software is now eating software.
Early 1990sThe doctorates come home to IISc. A group of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon PhDs in their early thirties turned up in Bengaluru to do serious work in India. One of them, Dr B. Gurumurthy, gave Salagame the nudge that put him into deep engineering. He rates a timely nudge above almost anything else in a career.
1997Bosch Germany opens the Bengaluru centre. Its largest technology centre outside Germany, and a native software company even then, Salagame insists, whatever the sign on the door said.
Early 2000sSensors arrive on cars with nothing to do. The instrumentation came first and the use case did not: nobody yet knew what the data was for. The car was still an asset engineered for five years and owned for twenty.
2011The data play starts. It became a settled fact that there would be far more sensors around, smart cities entered the conversation, and health and energy began converging onto the same platforms. Big data was the phrase everyone used.
2016Big data is renamed AI. Five years on the same trend line the label changed to AI and machine learning, and by this conversation it is the metaverse. Salagame likens the pattern to sixteenth-century tulip mania and then defends it: the exaggeration recruits believers and builds a talent base, which he calls minimum hygiene for a country like India.
2022The rename, and 25 years. Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions becomes Bosch Global Software Technologies, on the reasoning that a company should call itself what it does all day. The centre has spawned units in Vietnam, Mexico and Poland with front-ending teams in Japan and the US, and files about 100 patents a year. Engineering cycles that ran five years now run six months.
2032What the new name is actually for. Salagame is claiming a decade in which compute sits at the centre, the way mechanical engineering and then electronics did for Bosch before it. The binding constraint he names is talent, the one thing he expects every chief executive to lose sleep over for the next five to eight years.
