It’s corporate America Bleeding money through inefficient IT business processes and Jay Roland, founder Varex Solutionsbelieves the industry is happy with it. Technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of deferred IT fixes, misconfigurations, and more. operational inefficienciesIt is predicted to cost the United States enterprises 2.41 trillion dollars it costs 1.52 trillion dollars a year. With such staggering numbers, Roland argues that awareness still remains dangerously low.
“Projected numbers tell only part of the story,” he says. “The struggles companies go through are far greater than any number on the slide. I’ve gone to organizations that were spending $251 million a year on IT and found that $51 million of that was spent annually on problems they didn’t even know existed.“
Jay Roland
Roland launched Varex Solutions to address the bottlenecks he witnessed. The company operates at a certain pressure point, a gap between what businesses believe IT is costing them and what it is actually costing them. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, Varex offers a suite of consulting services that include IT Service Management (ITSM) platform implementation, maturity assessment, health optimization and SLA practice guidance.
According to Roland, the company’s main liability is bottlenecks, technical debt, misconfigurations and workflow inefficiencies and then turn those findings into actionable improvements that help increase ROI. This is achieved with Varex’s special technical debt calculator. He explains that the tool requires only three pieces of information from a company: industry, number of employees and annual revenue.
From these three data points, Roland’s outlined algorithm, built on years of archetypal industry modeling, is designed to automatically populate the entire financial landscape. The resulting costs, wasted resources, action steps and return on investment.
Roland explains:There is no artificial intelligence involved in this whole process. These are all algorithmically structured technical debt assessments. There’s no point telling someone they’re spending money unless you show them how to stop. Otherwise, it’s just noise. When I give you a number, I can show you exactly how I came up with it and your own IT team can verify it.“
While most paths follow a direct pipeline formed by education, Roland’s entry into the industry literally came through a side door. In November 1999, he and a friend signaled to a local Internet service provider in Pontiac, Michigan that they intended to play video games on a T3 line. Someone left the broken computer on his desk and walked away. He started to fix it. ““After ten minutes, a manager walked past me, looked at the screen and told me they were going to put me on the payroll.”“
He brought these skills to life through a career in and out of the industry, the dot-com crash, a tech support subscription startup he co-founded, and a chapter developing a popular role-playing game that gave him the precise spreadsheet modeling skills he would later need to build Varex. Roland identifies this as his defining professional trait.
“Whatever I do, I bring everything with me,” he says. “What began as a projective analysis of character alignment in a Dungeons and Dragons-style game evolved into the use of spreadsheet software to optimize the citation process, and eventually the algorithms behind it. Varex Solutions. You never know when you’ll need it.“
Roland remembers growing up with modest means, without the cushion of inherited privilege, and he credits this experience as the source of his refusal to accept inefficiency simply as the value of work that shaped his work. “The water that boils the egg softens the potatoes,” he says. “Different people react differently to the same situations. It was sheer will and determination that brought me here, to give something to my children, to do something.“
He rejects the common notion of walking into a boardroom with abstract promises of advice. Instead, Roland believes in giving administrators a specific, verified number. He explains that “I show them: here’s what you’re wasting, here’s the evidence, and how to fix it.The calculator is designed to bridge the gap between uncertain forecasts and difficult accountability, he says.
The resistance he often encounters tells its own story. “I asked once CIO If I can help uncover $25-40 million in unnecessary IT spending per year,” remembers “But the response I got was indifference.“Roland believes this dynamic exists because uncovering decades of preventable waste is a conversation most executives never want to have.”Would you like to tell your CFO that you’ve been spending tens of millions of dollars every year all these years?he asks.
The question that Roland keeps turning to is a straightforward one: how bad does a problem have to be before the people in charge of it decide that it actually is a problem? How many misconfigurations must accumulate before the cumulative damage becomes unsustainable? This conversation exists for Varex Solutions moving forward, and in Roland’s timeline, it’s overdue.
