<div>Vijay Ratnaparkhe has been at the helm of Robert Bosch Engineering India Limited (RBEI) for several years. RBEI has literally defined the Euro 50 billion parent company, Robert Bosch GmbH's, outlook towards the connected world. Today, there are over 16,000 engineers in RBEI and all of them are focused on building software that makes connected and smart applications a reality. It is software that is going to make all machines intelligent to reduce the impact on the planet by moving the world to adopt better safety standards. Added to that there is regulation clamping down on automobile companies to lowering carbon emissions and machines need to be made smarter if they are to reduce pollution. RBEI is bustling with activity with global cars, of General Motors and Jaguar, being parked in the "experiment" lab to make them smarter vehicles. RBEI has filed over 250 patents in the past two years and Ratnaparkhe attributes the success to the core engineering training that his company has enabled. </div><div> </div><div>In a chat with <em>BW | Businessworld's </em><strong>Vishal Krishna, </strong>Ratnaparkhe says RBEI is now focused on building connected cities and have the bandwidth to do so. Excerpts from the interview: </div><div> </div><div><strong>How is the engineering talent shaping up? And what is a smart city?</strong><br>It has been depth oriented and a skills oriented organisation. We have filed fewer patents as compared to 2013 because we focused on creating a larger value driven approach. In this centre we are building products, which is why we are pushing engineers to innovate for the global market. Last year we filed only 79 patents. This centre is operating for the worldwide group. We have not only built global products, we have also built local products. The predictive maintenance platform for the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation was one of the few things that allowed us to show case how software can really change the way we manage our buses to reduce maintenance costs and increase driver productivity. </div><div> </div><div>However that remained a pilot. When it comes to smart cities we are already pioneers in building applications for automobile manufacturers. For a city to be smart it goes beyond just connectivity. The Ministry of Urban Development along with all leaders of the State is planning a road map. They will have to keep aspects of energy conservation, cleanliness and safety as the priority for a smart city. Here sensors from cars to homes to government run infrastructure to various other stakeholders is reality and someone has to define a new business model.</div><div> </div><div><strong>What kind of business models would come about?</strong></div><div>There will be service providers in every layer. There is data analytics for video and images, which is needed for security applications. This will be dominated by the product players and will give us a play in building rugged cameras and sensor and also adding analytics to the portfolio of services. The question is who will hold this data. What is the role of the government in a connected world and will they add payment services with third party service providers. It will be a co-creative business model with several IT Services players, start-ups, government and product companies coming together. However, we need standards. It is these standards that will define what next. Today there is a case for building machine learning for predictive maintenance. The industry will require data scientists and these individuals will build statistical models to understand rate of crime, failures in lighting systems and much more. Smartness is not just for cities it will be required in manufacturing and our sensors will analyse machine to machine communication and their rate of failure. Also there will be prescriptive analysis.</div><div> </div><div><strong>We have been focusing on connected cars for several years, where is that heading?</strong></div><div>Adaptive cruise control has become a standard in the west. Things like emergency breaking, haptics for acceleration and several safety features will become standard applications. The cost of the hardware is falling and the software cost in the car is going up to at least 10 per cent or more in high end cars. There are several new applications that are coming to mid ranged Indian cars, which will be catering to safety, entertainment and connectivity. You have seen a pilot with one of the top OEMs in the country where we allow the app to mirror phone applications on to the entertainment screen or the telematics unit of the car. We have opened a new engineering centre in Mexico that will also do a lot of work on connected vehicles. Manufacturers are already placing a bet on standards for connectivity, is Ethernet or FlexRay only time will tell. Smart cities in the west will have cars that will communicate with each other by 2020.<br><br>All cars launched by 2018 in the west will have smart applications. By 2018 RBEI will increase its software presence for home applications, health, automotive and energy side of the business. We done a small pilot for a Kerala based hospital on connected apps for consumers and the hospital. It was basically an app for mothers to be engaged with the hospitals on creating appointments for treating their children and also to engage with the hospital staff through the app on enquiries. </div><div> </div><div><strong>What about the role of start-ups?</strong></div><div>We follow startups closely globally with the parent company's venture fund. In India the activity has picked up tremendously and there are ideas that we are always scouting for, either to engage with them or just to look at the skillsets. I cannot tell you the nature of our work with engaging startups here. Like we discussed there are several opportunities and we need to look at the ideas base before we engage with them.</div>
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