The concealed price of complacency and Jay Roland's initiative to combat the technical debt crisis in corporate America.

      Corporate America is losing vast amounts of money due to inefficient IT business processes, and Jay Roland, the founder of Varex Solutions, believes the industry is too complacent about it. Technical debt— the accumulated cost of postponed IT fixes, misconfigurations, and various operational inefficiencies— is estimated to cost US companies $2.41 trillion annually, with a fix costing $1.52 trillion. Despite these alarming figures, Roland claims that awareness of the issue remains alarmingly low.

      "The projected figures reveal only a fraction of the situation," he states. "The challenges companies face are much more significant than any numerical data. I’ve entered organizations spending $251 million yearly on IT and discovered that $51 million of that was wasted annually on issues they were unaware of."

      To tackle the bottlenecks he observed, Roland founded Varex Solutions. The firm operates in a critical area, addressing the gap between what enterprises think their IT costs them and its actual cost. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Varex provides a range of consulting services, including IT Service Management (ITSM) platform implementations, maturity assessments, health optimization, and service level agreement (SLA) guidance.

      According to Roland, the primary goal of the company is to identify bottlenecks, technical debt, misconfigurations, and workflow inefficiencies, and then transform those insights into actionable enhancements that improve ROI. This is facilitated by Varex’s proprietary technical debt calculator, which, he notes, requires just three inputs from a company: industry, employee count, and annual revenue.

      Using these three data points, Roland’s algorithm— developed from years of industrial modeling— is designed to automatically create a comprehensive financial overview. The output aims to provide an integrated analysis of spending, wasted resources, action items, and return on investment.

      Roland explains, "There’s no AI involved in this entire process. Everything is based on algorithmically structured technical debt assessments. It’s pointless to tell someone they’re wasting money unless you can illustrate how to halt it. Otherwise, it’s merely background noise. When I present a number, I can demonstrate precisely how I derived it, and your own IT team can corroborate it."

      Unlike the typical routes into the industry, Roland's entry was unconventional. In November 1999, he accompanied a friend to a local internet service provider in Pontiac, Michigan, where he intended to play video games on the T3 line. When someone left a broken computer at his desk, he began to fix it. "Ten minutes later, a manager passed by, looked at the screen, and told me I’d be added to the payroll," he recalls. "That was my entry into IT."

      He has carried that resourcefulness throughout a career that has seen him oscillate in and out of the industry, navigating the dot-com crash, co-founding a tech support subscription startup, and advancing a popular role-playing game that equipped him with the spreadsheet modeling skills necessary to develop Varex. He considers this adaptability to be his defining professional quality.

      "No matter what I do, I bring everything with me," he states. "What began as projective analysis on character progression in a Dungeons and Dragons-style game evolved into using spreadsheet software to refine a quoting process, and ultimately into the algorithms that underpin Varex Solutions. You never know when those skills will come in handy."

      Roland remembers growing up in modest circumstances without the safety net of inherited wealth, viewing that background as the source of his refusal to accept inefficiency as just part of doing business— a mindset that now informs his work. "The same water that boils the egg also softens the potato," he remarks. "Different individuals react differently to the same situations. It was pure determination and will that propelled me to create something and provide for my children."

      He dismisses the typical notion of entering a boardroom with vague consulting promises. Instead, Roland believes in presenting executives with a clear, verified figure. He explains, "I show them: this is what you’re wasting, this is the evidence, and this is how to resolve it." The calculator, he asserts, was designed to bridge the gap between ambiguous forecasts and firm accountability.

      The resistance he frequently encounters tells its own story. "I once asked a CIO if I could help uncover $25 to $40 million a year in unnecessary IT expenses," he recalls. "But I was met with indifference." Roland believes this is because revealing decades of avoidable waste is a topic many executives would prefer to avoid. "Would you want to inform your CFO that you’ve been squandering tens of millions of dollars annually for all these years?" he questions.

      The recurring question for Roland is a straightforward one: how severe must a problem be before those responsible recognize it as such? How many misconfigurations need to accumulate before the resulting damage becomes intolerable? Varex Solutions exists to advance this conversation, and according to Roland, the time for it is