Patent ID: 8364945

Claim:
A method of targeting a computer system to provide selected software to the computer system, the method comprising: determining that a computer system is unknown to a configuration management system; determining whether to configure the computer system based on a criteria; selectively provisioning the computer system based on the criteria, the criteria including at least one of an architecture, a site code, and an internet protocol (IP) subnet; and when the computer system is selected for provisioning, distributing selected software to the computer system, wherein the software distributed to the computer system is selected by the configuration management system based on a system class of the computer system, wherein the system class is determined by the configuration management system based on the criteria, wherein the configuration management system receives a global identifier that indicates that the computer system is an unknown system, wherein the configuration management system deploys policy information and the selected software to the computer system, and wherein the configuration management system reserves null variables that are to be populated with system specific information associated with the computer system, the null variables assigned prior to the computer system becoming known to the configuration management system.