Bring on factory-to-dealer incentives.

Ever since the notion of e-commerce came to the Internet, products including books, movies, plane tickets, and pornography have proven popular purchases for Web suffers. But cars? Automobile manufacturers such as Saturn have been experimenting with hawking their vehicles online, but if you ask David R. Holmes, chairman of IT company Reynolds & Reynolds (whose biggest customer is the auto industry), the idea is preposterous.

"Buying a car is still a total experience; you don't buy it like you do a book," he says. "A car has got a lot of your personality in it, and there are several options to choose from. The experience must begin at the dealership." As far as Holmes is concerned, the 20,000 dealerships in the U.S. will always be around. And his job is to make sure R&R stays with them.

The bulk of the Dayton, OH-based IT corporation's business is in supplying forms and information management systems to automotive clients. This is the company's bread and butter, a side of the business that increased by 9 percent in revenues last year over '97. The company's smaller but growing (by 12 percent in '98 over the previous year) business systems division provides similar setups for non-automotive clients such as Coca-Cola and Turner Broadcasting.

Today's R&R is a far cry from the company's more narrowly focused beginnings. Paper was R&R's specialty when it was founded in 1866, but Holmes says the future lies in integrated solutions. R&R sells configurations of software, hardware, and communications as solutions that quickly provide dealers with the data they need to cut costs, manage their documents more effectively, enhance customer service, and make myriad other improvements. "We have a policy that is about driving a partnership with our customers," says Holmes. "We don't just drop off hardware and software and say, 'Good luck, have fun.' The relationship is a long one."

Born in Salt Lake City and raised in Southern California, Holmes went to work in product management at General Foods, where he gave "Shake 'n' Bake" the go-ahead and made the risky but fruitful decision to sign comedian Bill Cosby as the Jell-O pitchman. After a stint at GE, where he boned up on the latest technological advances in the product-marketing department, Holmes was invited aboard Reynolds & Reynolds in 1984 to head up its then rather messy and crude computer operation. Not only did he become the first non-family executive to achieve such a high position in the company, but by 1987, he moved up to COO before making CEO in 1989 and chairman a year later.

At the helm, Holmes has grown the company so effectively that R&R's turnaround from dowdy forms supplier to viable IT firm was featured as a case study in the business tome, Every Business is a Growth Business. His plans for a heath care business faded - "the long and short of it was that there was a crying need for good systems, and the market was large, but the game hadn't been played out and there was a lot of in-fighting going on" - but after selling that division last September, recent acquisitions in more familiar business terrain have proven solid. Those include solution providers Duplex Products and Crain-Drummond. In the automotive category, Holmes has established an international foothold (a must for further growth, he says) in Europe by purchasing a 26.5 percent stake in information management company Kalamazoo Computer Group.

Wasserstein & Perella director Stephen Dube says the company is in great shape, considering the robustness of the auto industry and the company's recovery from the economic burden of making acquisitions. He also sees promise for the company in the new enterprisewide dealerships some believe have forced smaller dealers out of business. "The business potential [for enterprise dealerships] is greater than it was with these smaller so-called mom-and-pop dealerships."

As for the future, Holmes wants to integrate R&R's offerings even more, driving intranet and e-commerce capabilities across all their clients' systems. Soon the company will move into its new 200,000-square-foot building, which will house R&R's university for training company employees - and those of its clients - in systems operation, general management strategy, and other topics.

With the new base, Holmes hopes to move into international markets and build on what he has stateside. He sees new opportunity with partnerships and new products. For example, the company will soon help clean up the mess it helped to create by rolling out an electronic archiving system that digitizes all the old files "stuffed in the basement."

The R&R chief is hoping such efforts will help the company continue its current rate of growth, without losing touch customer needs. "We don't have to with be on the bleeding edge," he says, "just the leading edge."

DAVE HOLMES Chairman and CEO Reynolds and Reynolds

"We...drive a partnership with our customers. We don't just drop off the hardware and say, 'Good luck.'"

Age: 59

Birthplace: Salt Lake City

Family: Wife: Nancy; children: Matt, 30; Steve, 26; Chuck, 22

Education: B.S., political science, Stanford University; M.B.A., Northwestern.

Pastimes: Skiing, sailing, model ship building. "I regret selling my Constitution. It was museum quality."

Car: Jaguar and 500SL, Red