Today's enterprise solutions consist of multiple components whose deployment must be coordinated across multiple, heterogeneous hosting environments, including operating systems, application servers, databases and other middleware. The requirements of software components on their hosting environments and their interdependencies must be fully specified in order to enable an autonomic management of solutions during their life cycle. The installable unit deployment descriptor illustrated in this paper supports a fully declarative specification of a solution and provides a foundation for autonomic deployment services, as well as for the exchange of solution data across different tools and management applications.