A man, a brick wall, and a quiet war on the useless dashboard.
Most enterprise software is bought to impress and then quietly ignored. Jim Bartoo runs a company built on the opposite bet - that visualization only earns its keep when somebody on the operational floor uses it every single day. As Chief Executive Officer of Visual Action Software, he ships software whose entire job is to make a sprawling dataset hold still long enough for a human to make a decision.
The product is called Flaremap, and it is patented. Underneath it is a deceptively humble idea: the treemap. Instead of a wall of numbers, you get interlocking rectangles - sized by one variable, colored by another. Revenue here, risk there, region in the shading. A national budget, a fraud pattern, a supply chain, a power grid - each becomes a single picture you can scan in seconds. Bartoo did not invent the treemap. The man who did, University of Maryland professor Ben Shneiderman, sits on Visual Action's advisory bench. That is the kind of detail that tells you what sort of company this is: the inventor is in the room.
Today Visual Action, privately held and headquartered in Texas, points its rectangles at the unglamorous, high-stakes problems - threat assessment, performance monitoring, fraud detection, risk reduction. Defense and national intelligence. Energy and utilities. Healthcare cost analysis. Government spending laid bare. The work is less “pretty infographic” and more “the screen the operations team stares at when something is going wrong.”
“Organizations are rushing to implement visualization solutions. Visual Action brings operational relevance to the forefront.”
Jim Bartoo, on the 2015 mergerWhat he actually does all day
In April 2024, Visual Action announced Platform 7.4 - a release with the unfashionably honest tagline “Disciplined Workflow Meets Offroad Analysis.” It added multiple application pages and tabbed groupings (because real analysts run out of screen), customizable themes so the software wears the customer's brand, a Process Preset Control for assembling multiple starting points, and a Process Logic API for advanced data ingestion. None of it screams. All of it is about the same thing Bartoo has chased for two decades: getting the tool into the hands of the person who has to act on it.
His own summary of the house style is blunter than any feature list. “Our customers and partners recognize Visual Action for the ‘whatever it takes’ attitude we bring to organizational challenges,” he said when 7.4 launched. It is the line of a man who runs a small, sharp shop rather than a sprawling one - the kind of place where the engineering director and the finance director report straight to the CEO.
The road to the rectangle
Bartoo did not arrive at treemaps by accident. He is a Cornell engineer - a B.S. in Engineering - who went back to Cornell for an MBA at the Johnson Graduate School of Management. Engineering taught him how systems break; the MBA taught him why people buy. He has spent the years since at the intersection.
The resume reads like a tour of enterprise software's heavyweight era. He started as a management consultant at EDS, the services giant later swallowed by HP. He became a Managing Principal at Oracle. He moved to Business Objects - the business intelligence pioneer eventually acquired by SAP - as Director of Business Development. Each stop was a closer orbit around the same gravity well: how do you turn an organization's data into something it can actually steer by?
In January 2003 he joined The Hive Group as Vice President and General Manager. The Hive Group was the treemap company - it took Shneiderman's academic visualization and made it enterprise-strength, building interfaces for operational and financial analysis. Bartoo rose to CEO. Its flagship product carried the unforgettable name Honeycomb.
How a Flaremap ThinksOne picture, many variables.
Rectangles sized by weight, colored by risk. The bigger the box, the bigger the stake. The hotter the color, the louder the alarm. That is the whole grammar - and why an analyst can read a thousand data points in a glance.
Illustrative graphic - not live data. A real Flaremap renders thousands of nested rectangles.
The merger he engineered
On January 26, 2015, in Richardson, Texas, the deal Bartoo had been building toward closed. The Hive Group merged with Visual Action Software. The combined company kept the Visual Action name and put Bartoo in the CEO chair. Honeycomb was retired and reborn as the Flaremap Application Suite - one hive metaphor swapped for a brighter one. The logic was straightforward: marry The Hive Group's battle-tested treemap engine to Visual Action's big-data visualization chops, and aim the result at organizations drowning in data investments they could not yet read.
A year later, in 2016, the company shipped Flaremap JS 6.2, billed as “real-time visual interfaces for real-time process challenges.” The throughline never changes. Static reports describe yesterday. Bartoo's software is built to show you now.
Why it matters
There is a whole industry that sells the rush - the dashboard that looks expensive in the demo and gathers dust by Q3. Bartoo has spent a career on the unglamorous other half of the sentence: the return. Fully tested. Widely deployed. Operationally relevant. The words are not poetry, but they are a discipline, and in a field addicted to novelty that discipline is its own kind of contrarian stance.
He keeps a low public profile - no viral keynotes, no manifesto threads. What he has instead is a patent, a product that has survived a merger and seven major versions, and a customer base in sectors where a misread chart is not a rounding error but a missed threat. For the people who run those operations, that is the entire point.