These days, the glass is more often viewed as half empty than half full and stellar approval ratings are hard to achieve. With consumer ratings and rankings proliferating on every website, it is increasingly tough to satisfy demands.

Still, I was surprised in the disappointment expressed in a recent UBM TechWeb survey sponsored by CA Technologies. Of 460 IT decision makers at medium and large companies, fully 63 percent say they are disappointed with the cost savings they’ve achieved with virtualization.

Isn’t virtualization, along with cloud computing, a game-changing strategy all about cost savings, flexibility, scalability, speed to market and computing on demand? Moreover, most organizations are already using virtual servers, and many organizations will be using some type of cloud very soon. So why the disconnect?

The primary reason seems to be that previous-generation management tools are not well-equipped to handle the increased complexities that virtualization and cloud computing bring to the IT environment. Sprawl, as it’s known, happens when business units or other stakeholders spin up new virtual servers to support temporary processes— and IT can’t keep track of them.

The State of IT Automation survey, which examined automation in relation to use of virtualization and cloud computing technologies, found that nearly half (48 percent) of respondents who say complexities of virtualization have introduced new costs also say that most of their server provisioning processes are manual. On the flip side, 44 percent who have automated most of their provisioning processes — retaining just a few manual steps — report they have significantly reduced costs through virtualization.

Ian Watts, Senior Technical Manager of BT Americas Inc., the North American division of communications solutions and services provider BT in the U.K., sums it up in the survey report this way: “Virtualization is a bean counter’s dream, but can be an operational nightmare.” Watts was interviewed for the report and says that BT Americas has more virtual servers than can be counted. Therefore, it has an enterprise initiative to automate and speed up customer order processing and reduce human error; virtualization is underpinning those efforts.

At the same time, Watts says, along with virtualization, redundancy and resiliency become more complex to design and build. “Change management is a huge overhead, as any changes need to be accepted by all applications and users sharing the same virtualization kit.”

No doubt virtualization has its rewards. More than half ( 53 percent) of those surveyed say it takes less than a day to deploy or provision a new virtual server, even though a whopping 97 percent of respondents still use manual steps in the deployment and provisioning of physical and virtual servers. Additional automation could speed deployment and provisioning even more by eliminating the manual labor involved in provisioning. But perhaps more importantly, it would help ensure that the deployments were in line with the security policies, licensing requirements and access rights necessary for clean, efficient virtualized environments.

Gartner has identified data center automation as a top trend in 2011 and beyond, predicting that by 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 percent of labor hours associated with IT services.

Let’s hope the predictions are right because the alternative likely will slow the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, and user approval ratings will plummet. More importantly, savings — and new revenue driven by innovative IT — will be more difficult to achieve. And that’s the true game changer.