With that in mind, Stratacache Tuesday announced OmniCast for SMS2003, a multicast distribution technology that enhances Microsoft SMS (Software Management System) by allowing enterprise IT managers to automatically deploy software updates and patches to every system in their network, Riegel said. Fully integrated with Microsoft SMS, OmniCast for SMS2003 simultaneously delivers and installs patches and software across the enterprise, thereby simplifying patch management and speeding major software transitions like the move to Vista, he said.

'OmniCast for SM...[is] a module that we built for the Microsoft SMS system that allows customers to use our OmniCast -- a reliable, multicast distribution system -- in concert with an existing Microsoft SMS system,' Riegel said.

By enabling one-click file distribution to a national or global network of distributed SMS servers, the software slashes the time and cost of applying Windows software updates and patches, he said. OmniCast for SMS2003 is a new version of Stratacache's content distribution software.

'SMS is very good on the LAN, but when you get to wide area networks it's not necessarily optimized for that. And that's where come in,' Riegel said. 'What our customers want to do is to reliably multicast content. So from a functional perspective, let's say you're a large retailer with a 100 sites -- with normal SMS if I'm going to send out a patch that's a 100 megabytes, I send it to site number one, then site number two and then site number three. With our OmniCast SMS, I can send it to all 100 sites simultaneously and that cuts down on the bandwidth consumption. But more importantly it cuts down on the time it takes deploy software updates and patches.'

Stratacache has worked closely with Microsoft to apply its patented content distribution technology to the challenge of distributing software updates, the company said.