The new centre would come up in the Bangalore city within the next four months. The centre would house more than 100 software professionals, taking the company's total manpower to 200 by the year 2000. At present, Paragon India has 40 professionals in its Bangalore unit.

``Our investment in the country has already crossed $600,000. During the next financial year, the company will have a turnover of $1 million from its Indian operations,'' Paragon Solutions India Ltd managing director Avinash C Agarwal told The Financial Express.The company is also plan ning to offer an employee stock option plan (ESOP) for its employees in India. Paragon may announce an ESOP (equity shares of the parent company) shortly to 20 per cent of its employees.

The $15 million parent firm is also planning to go in for an IPO in the US. ``The parent has already shortlisted a US firm for acquisition and an announcement is likely within the next few months,'' he added.

Paragon Solutions' offerings are focused on software tools and services for online learning solutions in the country.

Its vision is to leverage advanced distributed computing and Internet technologies coupled with instructional design techniques to transform companies into high performance learning organisations.

The tools offered by Paragon would also help in improving the quality of training. ``This should increase the productivity of the training efforts in any organisation including software companies which recruit a large number of employees and constantly retrain them to keep them updated,'' Agarwal added.

Paragon's end-to-end learning solutions encompass software tools, courseware development services to create Internet or intranet based online learning systems. The company's offerings included i-Academy, i-SAPSim and i-Role.The company's i-Academy is a suite of three integrated modules - learning server, learning delivery server and learning management server. These three modules integrate into get online training programmes up and running quickly.

Its i-SAPSim is a unique stand alone tool that offers end-user business procedures and software training via company's intranet and the Internet, while i-Role tool from Paragon allows organisations to offer skill evaluation across the Internet and intranet, allowing employees or trainers to test their skills by taking examinationonline.