Altiris, Inc, a pioneer of IT lifecycle management solutions that reduce the total cost of owning IT resources, today announced the launch of Altiris Deployment Solution 6.5 with new speed enhancements, advanced security features and best-of-breed heterogeneous hardware and software manageability. Deployment Solution provides customers with the power to rapidly change and manage diverse computing resources to facilitate dynamic business requirements while automating hardware and software change, deployment and migration for optimal security and availability.

Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm, uses Deployment Solution in support of more than 13,000 Windows XP clients. Bruce Sherman, Booz Allen Hamilton Associate, said, "We have determined that Deployment Solution 6.5 could deploy our gold load as much as three times faster, so we decided release candidate 1 was ready to put into our production environment. This version will help us support our employees while providing additional security measures we require as an enterprise."

Steve Morton, Altiris VP of product management and marketing, said, "The world's largest hardware vendors have standardized on Altiris Deployment Solution as their preferred provisioning solution and can leverage version 6.5 for additional speed, manageability, security and cost effectiveness. Broad industry support for this significant new version would add to the millions of servers and clients that have been efficiently deployed, migrated and managed using Deployment Solution."

Deployment Solution now supports Windows Preinstallation Environment  (WinPE) and Linux as pre-boot environments that help speed system deployment times by 200 to 300 percent while supporting removable media (CD, DVD, USB), PXE and automation partitions in both environments. To help prevent these powerful features from getting in the wrong hands, Deployment Solution now offers role and scope-based security rights integrated with Active Directory groups and key-based client/server authentication.