Corporate America is bleed money through inefficient IT business processes, and Jay Roland, founder of Varex SolutionsHe believes the industry is complacent about this. Technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of deferred IT fixes, incorrect configurations, and others operational inefficienciesit is expected to cost us companies 2.41 trillion dollars a year, which will cost 1.52 billion dollars to repair. With such staggering numbers, Roland maintains that awareness, however, remains precariously low.
“The projected numbers only tell part of the story,“, says.”The struggles businesses go through are far greater than any number on a slide. I walked into organizations that spend $251 million a year on IT and found that $51 million was wasted, year after year, on problems they didn’t even know existed.“
jay roland
To address the bottlenecks it witnessed, Roland launched Varex Solutions. The business operates within a specific pressure point, the gap between what businesses believe their IT is costing them and what it is actually costing them. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Varex offers a suite of consulting services covering ITSM (IT service management) platform implementations, maturity assessments, health optimization, and practical SLA 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 practical improvements that help increase return on investment. This is achieved through Varex’s proprietary technical debt calculator. The tool, he explains, requires only three contributions from a company: industry, employee base and annual income.
From those three data points, Roland’s algorithm, which he says is based on years of archetypal industry models, is designed to auto-complete a complete financial picture. The result is intended to encompass a coherent analysis of expenses, wasted resources, action steps and return on investment.
Roland explains: “There is no AI involved in this entire process. These are all algorithmically structured technical debt assessments. There’s no point 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 channel shaped by education, Roland’s entry into the industry came literally through a side door. In November 1999, he traveled with a friend to a local Internet service provider in Pontiac, Michigan, with the intention of playing video games on the T3 line. Someone placed a broken computer on his desk and walked away. He started to fix it. “Ten minutes later, a manager walked by, looked at the screen and told me they had put me on the payroll,” he recalls. “That was my entry into IT.“
He carried that ingenuity through a career that dipped in and out of the industry, through the dot-com crisis, through a tech support subscription startup he co-founded, and through a chapter promoting a popular role-playing game that gave him the exact set of spreadsheet modeling skills he would later need to build Varex. Roland identifies this as his defining professional trait.
“No matter what I do, I bring it all with me,“, says.”What started as a projective analysis on character leveling in a Dungeons and Dragons style game turned into using spreadsheet software to optimize a quoting process and, eventually, the algorithms behind it. Varex Solutions. You never know when you’re going to need it.“
Roland remembers growing up with modest resources, without the cushion of inherited privilege, and frames that experience as the source of his refusal to accept inefficiency simply as the cost of doing business, which now shapes his work. “The same water that boils the egg softens the potato,“, says.”Different people react differently to the same circumstances. It was sheer will and determination that brought me here, to do something, to give something to my children.“
Reject the common notion of walking into a boardroom with abstract promises of consulting. Instead, Roland believes in giving 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 bridge the gap between vague projections and strict accountability.
The resistance he often encounters tells its own story. “I once asked CIO “If I could help uncover $25 million to $40 million a year in unnecessary IT spending,” remember. “But the response I received was indifference.“Roland believes this dynamic exists because uncovering decades of avoidable waste is a conversation most executives would prefer never to have.”Would you like to tell your CFO that you’ve been wasting tens of millions of dollars a year for all these years?“, ask.
The question Roland keeps coming back to is a straightforward one: How bad does a problem have to be before the people responsible decide it actually is a problem? How many misconfigurations must accumulate before the cumulative damage becomes unsustainable? That’s the conversation Varex Solutions aims to drive, and on Roland’s timeline, it’s already behind schedule.
