The hidden costs of discontent and Jay Roland’s mission to fight America’s corporate debt crisis
Corporate America is bleeding money from inefficient IT business processes, and Jay Roland, founder of Varex Solutions, believes the industry doesn’t care. Technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of deferred IT maintenance, malfunctions, and other inefficiencies, is expected to cost US businesses $2.41 trillion annually, costing $1.52 trillion to fix. In surprising numbers, Roland says awareness, however, remains very low.
“The numbers shown only tell part of the story,“he prunes.”The struggles that companies face are much bigger than any slide show. I’ve gone into organizations that spend $251 million a year on IT and found $51 million wasted, year after year, on problems they didn’t even know existed.“
Jay Roland
To address the challenges he saw, Roland launched Varex Solutions. The company operates under certain pressure, in a space where businesses believe their IT is worth them, and what it is worth. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, Varex offers consulting services including ITSM (IT Service Management) platform implementation, maturity assessment, health optimization, and SLA practice guidelines.
According to Roland, the company’s primary commitment is to uncover bottlenecks, technical debts, misconfigurations, and workflow inefficiencies and turn those findings into actionable improvements that help increase ROI. This is accomplished through Varex’s technical credit calculation. The tool, he explains, requires only three things from the company: industry, number of employees, and annual revenue.
From those three data points, Roland’s algorithm, which he notes is built on years of archetypal industry modeling, is designed to automatically populate the entire financial landscape. The result is intended to include an integrated analysis of costs, wasted resources, action steps, and return on investment.
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Roland explains, “There is no AI involved in the whole process. These are all algorithmically programmed technical credit checks. There is no need to tell someone that you are spending money unless you can show them how to stop. Other than that, it’s just noise. If I give you a number, I can show you how I got to it, and your IT team can confirm it.“
While many paths follow a straight path created 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 put a broken computer on his desk and left. He started to fix it. “Ten minutes later, the manager passed by, looked in the mirror, and told me that they would put me on the payroll.” “That was my entry into IT.“
He applied that intelligence to jobs that came and went in the industry, through the dot-com crash, through a subscription tech support startup he co-founded, and through a chapter developing a popular simulation game that gave him the spreadsheet modeling skills he would later need to build Varex. Roland identifies this as his defining technical feature.
“Whatever I do, I bring everything,“he prunes.”What started as a visual analysis of character levels in a Dungeons and Dragons style game evolved into using spreadsheet software to improve the quoting process, and eventually into the algorithms behind Varex Solutions. You never know when you will need it.“
Roland recalls growing up with modest means, without inherited privilege, and credits that experience as the source of his refusal to accept unemployment as a cost of doing business, which now shapes his career. The same water that boils an egg softens a potato,“he prunes.”Different people react differently to the same situations. It was the will and determination that got me here, to do something, to give something to my children.“
He rejects the common idea of walking into a meeting room with vague promises of consultation. Instead, Roland believes in giving managers a specific, guaranteed number. He explains, “I show them: this is what is wrong, this is the evidence, and here is the way to fix it.” The calculator, he says, is designed to bridge the gap between vague assumptions and hard accountability.
The opposition he often faces tells its own story. “I once asked a CIO if I could help find $25 million to $40 million a year in unnecessary IT spending, ” you remember. “But the response I received was indifferent.” Roland believes this shift exists because exposing decades of avoidable waste is a conversation most managers would like to have.Would you like to tell your CFO that you’ve been wasting tens of millions of dollars a year all these years?” he asked.
The question Roland keeps coming back to is straightforward: how bad does a problem have to be before the people dealing with it decide it really is a problem? How many negative fixes must accumulate before the cumulative damage becomes unmanageable? That’s a conversation Varex Solutions is here to take forward, and on Roland’s timeline, it’s already overdue.
