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In a move to cut operational costs, Pumatech Inc. , a maker and provider of synchronization software for wireless gadgets, restructured Tuesday when it pared its U.S.-based engineering staff by some 80 people.

Pumatech will also consolidate its business facilities located in Los Gatos, Calif., and Nashua, N.H., to existing facilities located in San Jose and Santa Cruz, Calif. On the other hand, the San Jose-based firm bolstered its offshore engineering concerns by shifting projects otherwise handled by U.S. facilities to its Romania-based partner Softvision.

Pumatech President and CEO Brad Rowe explained his firm's maneuvers in a press statement.

"The move to transition more of our development effort to offshore engineering resources allows Pumatech to maintain its commitment to delivering new products meeting our customer needs at considerable cost savings," Rowe said. "Rather than reduce overall engineering capacity, we plan to increase it. At the same time, we will establish a significant European presence helping us to build a business base in this large and growing market."

The firm, whose customers and partners base includes Oracle, Yahoo! and NTT DoCoMo, believes all of the workforce reductions and consolidations will be finito by April 30, 2002 and expects its total workforce to be about 135 employees. Pumatech will offer detail on its fiscal second quarter results during its quarterly earnings conference call on Feb. 27.

Though Pumatech relies on its synchronization software as its bread and butter, other wireless service providers have not been so lucky in the past year. OmniSky was delisted from the NASDAQ in Dec. 2001 and was subsequently snapped up by ISP EarthLink. In the same month, Yada Yada and Arch Wireless filed for Chapter 11.