The plan which in the country is a cashless operation, has been cleared by the Reserve Bank of India, which has also informed the company that such plans no longer need RBI clearances.

Parametric Technology's plan will cover all its R&D employees, about 200 at present, who will get stocks in numbers comparable with their international counterparts. This will ensure that employees get a `substantailly, larger package, Desai said. Declining to give numbers since these were still under consideration, he said the decisive factors would be the level at which the employee was and would definitely be performance linked.

The R&D centre at Pune, set up by Computervision, developed about 80 per cent of its products here. This is expected tocontinue under Parametric, with scope for growth. Company regional director South Asia Anurag Srivastav said Parametric will make additional investments here, in terms of upgrading hardware. The centre will develop localised products, he added.

Desai said they were in need of greater bandwidth and were talking to the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) for greater satellite connectivity. Its present 128 kbps link will soon be upgraded to 512 kbps which could be increased to 1 Mb.

Parametric, which is a leading CAD/CAM/CAE supplier of software tools and launched its Pro/engineer family of tools in 1998, has been widely accepted by automotive, heavy engineering, aerospace, domestic electronics, medical electronics and consumer goods manufacturers. Desai said they will now look to users of CV products to use Parametric ones. CV had fewer customers though more seats per customer while Parametric has more customers, providing opportunity for growth.