Phoenix -- Pinacor Inc. predicts its new enterprise business unit will be the distributor's fastest growing, accounting for as much as 20 percent of total revenue by 2000.

The unit, dubbed Enterprise Solutions, combines Pinacor's Advanced Systems Division, which focused on IBM Corp. midrange products, with networking products, memory storage and software ISV offerings, said Harman Cadis, Pinacor's group vice president of Enterprise Solutions.

"The cornerstone will be IBM midrange, but we're looking at what else we need," Cadis said.

Pinacor is holding discussions with Compaq Computer Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., but there are no specific plans in place to add those vendors yet, Cadis said.

Also, Pinacor is working with the major ISVs to form relationships where Pinacor and an ISV can co-market the necessary services to customers, he said.

"We're not saying we want to sell [everything]," Cadis said. "But we want to sell with them."

The new business unit will be different from other enterprise offerings from competitors because of Pinacor's market position, Cadis said. "We're in the middle," he said, referring to having a greater product breadth than more specialized distributors but having more specific offerings than the largest distributors.

The sales force will be structured to aggressively go after corporations looking for enterprise solutions, Cadis said. He predicted the Enterprise Solutions sales will more than double year-over-year, reaching 15 percent of Pinacor sales in 1999 and growing to 20 percent next year.

Pinacor President Jim Manton said Pinacor is committed to helping resellers in the high-end market.

"The Enterprise Solutions Business Unit will work individually with resellers to address specific solutions to organically grow their businesses in the enterprise market and leverage our expertise and current infrastructure on the PC side of the business to the midrange side as well," Manton said.

In an attempt to reach its goals, the size of the new business unit will triple compared with the previous size of the Advanced Systems Division, to a total of 80 employees, Pinacor executives said. Those employees will be made up of inside segment managers, field-sales representatives, customer marketing representatives, business development specialists aligned around specific supplier products such as the RS/6000, and inside and field technical managers.

Specific programs and services include ISO 9001-certified custom configuration, marketing and lead generation and financial services.