Corporate America is hemorrhaging money through inefficient IT business processes, and Jay Roland, founder of Varex Solutions, believes that the industry is complacent about it. Technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of deferred IT fixes, misconfigurations, and other operational inefficiencies, is projected to cost US enterprises $2.41 trillion a year, costing $1.52 trillion to fix. With numbers this staggering, Roland argues that awareness, however, remains precariously low.
“The numbers projected only tell part of the story,” he says. “The struggles companies are going through are far greater than any figure on a slide. I've walked into organizations spending $251 million a year on IT and found $51 million of it being wasted, year over year, on problems they didn't even know existed.”
Jay Roland
To address the bottlenecks he witnessed, Roland launched Varex Solutions. The company functions within a specific pressure point, in the gap where enterprises believe their IT is costing them, and what it is actually costing them. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, Varex offers a suite of consulting services spanning ITSM (IT Service Management) platform implementations, maturity assessments, health optimization, and SLA practice guidance.
According to Roland, the company's key commitment is to uncover bottlenecks, technical debt, misconfigurations, and workflow inefficiencies and then turn those findings into actionable improvements that help increase ROI. This is achieved by Varex's proprietary technical debt calculator. The tool, he explains, requires just three inputs from a company: industry, employee headcount, and annual revenue.
From those three data points, Roland's algorithm, which he notes is built on years of archetypal industrial modelling, is designed to autofill an entire financial landscape. The output is intended to encompass a cohesive analysis of expenditure, wasted resources, action steps, and return on investment.
Roland explains, “There's no AI involved in this entire process. This is all algorithmically structured technical debt assessments. There's no point in telling someone they're wasting money unless you can show them how to stop. Otherwise, it's just noise. When I give you a number, I can show you exactly how I arrived at it, and your own IT team can verify it.”
While most paths follow a direct pipeline shaped by education, Roland's entry into the industry came through a side door, literally. In November 1999, he tagged along with a friend to a local internet service provider in Pontiac, Michigan, intending to play video games on the T3 line. Someone placed a broken computer on his desk and walked away. He started fixing it. “Ten minutes later, a manager walked by, glanced at the screen, and told me they'd put me on the payroll,” he recalls. “That was my entry into IT.”
He carried that resourcefulness through a career that moved in and out of the industry, through the dot-com crash, through a tech support subscription startup he co-founded, and through a chapter advancing a popular role-playing game that handed him the exact spreadsheet modeling skillset he would later need to build Varex. Roland identifies this as his defining professional trait.
“No matter what I do, I bring everything with me,” he says. “What started as projective analysis on character leveling in a Dungeons and Dragons-style game converted into using a spreadsheet software to optimize a quoting process, and eventually into the algorithms behind Varex Solutions. You never know when you're going to need it.”
Roland recalls growing up with modest means, without the cushion of inherited privilege, and he frames that experience as the source of his refusal to accept inefficiency as simply the cost of doing business, which now shapes his work. “The same water that boils the egg softens the potato,” he says. “Different people react differently to the same circumstances. It was sheer will and determination that got me here, to make something, to give my children something.”
He rejects the common notion of walking into a boardroom with abstract consulting promises. Instead, Roland believes in handing executives a specific, verified number. He explains, “I show them: this is what you're wasting, this is the proof, and this is how to fix it.” The calculator, he says, was built to close the distance between vague projections and hard accountability.
The resistance he often encounters tells its own story. “I once asked a CIO if I could help uncover $25 to $40 million a year in unnecessary IT spend,” he recalls. “But the response I received was one of indifference.” Roland believes this dynamic exists because uncovering decades of avoidable waste is a conversation most executives would prefer never to have. “Would you want to tell your CFO that you have been wasting tens of millions of dollars annually for all these years?” he asks.
The question Roland keeps returning to is a direct one: how bad does a problem have to get before the people responsible for it decide it's actually a problem? How many misconfigurations have to stack up before the cumulative damage becomes unsustainable? That is the conversation Varex Solutions exists to propel forward, and on Roland's timeline, it is already overdue.