BOSTON -- With the walls between IT domains crumbling, companies increasingly are putting in place policies, processes and technologies that serve the twofold purpose of managing and securing networks.

That was one theme among speakers at Network World's IT Roadmap: Boston conference this week, which drew close to 700 attendees and 75 exhibitors. While network management has long been perceived as the "Rodney Dangerfield of IT," said Jim Metzler, analyst and vice president at Ashton, Metzler & Associates, the technology plays such a large role in other IT domains that it demands attention.

"There is a sort of negative buzz around network management," Metzler told attendees. "But I see innovation."

Technologies, processes and products that help companies respond in a "real-time-enough fashion to threats, opportunities and situations that impact the health and well-being of the organization" represent the wave of innovation in management, Metzler said.

IT automation software, Web services management technologies and best practices frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library are among the areas of innovation in management.

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For David Hauser, automating the process of provisioning and patching some 500 servers with an IT operations staff of less than five people is what he considers management innovation. To start, the CTO and co-founder of GotVMail wanted to be able to quickly roll out desktops to new staff. Founded in 2003, the Weston, Mass., company currently has 35 employees, but Hauser said he expects that number to double in the next 12 months.

"Automation was never intended to replace IT staff, just shift their attention to more compelling tasks," he said.

Hauser shared with show attendees how he selected, deployed and currently maintains a pair of appliances from Kace to reduce manual labor, and more importantly secure his growing network of distributed data centers.

"Patch management and policy enforcement were two of the big factors we had in selecting a network management system," Hauser said.

The Kace system enables Hauser's staff to set policies and control application deployments on user machines. "We had a big security problem with people downloading and setting up applications to their machines themselves," he said.