The hidden cost of complacency and Jay Roland’s mission against corporate America’s technical debt crisis

At a glance:

• Varex Solutions claims US enterprises lose $2.41 trillion yearly to technical debt, with $1.52 trillion needed to fix it.
• Founder Jay Roland says his firm’s calculator reveals hidden waste, citing a case where $51 million of a $251 million IT budget was wasted annually.
• Varex, based in Nashville, offers ITSM implementations, maturity assessments, health optimization and SLA guidance using a three‑input algorithm.

How Varex’s technical debt calculator works

The calculator requires only three data points: the company’s industry, employee headcount and annual revenue. From these, Roland’s algorithm—built on years of archetypal industrial modelling—autofills a full financial landscape that breaks down expenditure, highlights wasted resources, suggests action steps and projects return on investment. He stresses that the tool contains no AI; it is a transparent, formula‑driven model that lets IT teams verify each step.

In practice, the output is meant to move conversations from vague estimates to concrete numbers. Roland explains, “I show them: this is what you’re wasting, this is the proof, and this is how to fix it.”

Despite its promise, Roland often meets resistance. He recalls asking a CIO whether he could help uncover $25 to $40 million a year in unnecessary IT spend, only to be met with indifference. He argues that executives avoid the conversation because admitting years of avoidable waste feels like a personal failure, even though the data are verifiable.

Roland’s background and the broader impact

Roland’s path into IT began unusually. 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 provider’s T3 line. When someone left a broken computer on his desk, he started fixing it; ten minutes later a manager noticed and put him on the payroll. That impromptu fix became his first job in the field.

He carried that resourcefulness through the dot‑com crash, a stint co‑founding a tech‑support subscription startup, and a period working on a popular role‑playing game where he built spreadsheet models for character leveling. Those modeling skills later became the foundation of Varex’s technical debt algorithm. Roland says he brings every experience with him, noting that “what started as projective analysis on character leveling … converted into using a spreadsheet software to optimize a quoting process, and eventually into the algorithms behind Varex Solutions.”

His philosophy rejects the idea of inefficiency as an unavoidable cost of doing business. He often cites the proverb, “The same water that boils the egg softens the potato,” to illustrate how identical circumstances produce different outcomes based on will and determination. By handing executives a specific, verified number instead of vague consulting promises, he aims to replace noise with actionable proof.

Roland’s driving question is how bad a problem has to get before the people responsible for it decide it’s actually a problem. He asks 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.