Perforce


Perforce, legally Perforce Software, Inc., is a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based developer of software used for developing and running applications, including version control software, web-based repository management, developer collaboration, application lifecycle management, web application servers, debugging tools and Agile planning software.
The company is equally owned by private equity firms Clearlake Capital and Francisco Partners.

History

Perforce Software was founded in 1995 in Alameda, California by Christopher Seiwald, a software developer and computer science graduate from UC Berkeley. Its first product was also called Perforce, and was a version control system allowing companies to collaborate on large software projects by keeping track of changes to both the source code and binary files.
In June 2013, the company released Helix Swarm, a tool for developers working in different geographical areas to collaborate on code review.
In June 2014, the company released a version of its Perforce versioning engine, by then known as P4D, which supported concurrency, the ability of a program to run multiple parts concurrently.
In March 2015, the company renamed its product as Perforce Helix, which now supported distributed development support and included security features allowing suspicious usage tracking. Helix's security capabilities included IP threat detection capabilities, co-developed with analytics vendor Interset. In October, the company collaborated with GitLab to release GitSwarm, a software tool that combined git distributed workflow for developers with Perforce's single code repository.
In February 2016, Seiwald sold the company to investment group Summit Partners, and Janet Dryer was named as new CEO. The company headquarters was relocated to Minneapolis. In November, Perforce announced the acquisition of Seapine Software, a provider of application lifecycle management tools. Seapine's TestTrack ALM software was rebranded as Helix ALM.
In September 2017, the company acquired Uppsala, Sweden-based Hansoft, a developer of Agile planning software. Also in September, Perforce announced it had acquired Finnish repository management services company Deveo. Deveo's products were merged into Perforce's Helix TeamHub, its first solo venture for Git-based development teams.
In January 2018, Summit Partners sold Perforce to private equity firm Clearlake Capital. In May, Perforce acquired UK-based Programming Research, a static code analysis firm. In June, the company announced that CEO Janet Dryer was moving to the role of Chair of the Board, and COO/CFO Mark Ties was taking the role of CEO. In October, the company acquired mobile and web automation testing company Perfecto.
In December 2018, Perforce announced the acquisition of Perfecto, a market leader in cloud-based automated mobile and web application test software solutions.
In January 2019, Perforce announced the acquisition of Rogue Wave Software, a software company with a focus on development tools for high-performance computing.
In April 2019, private equity firm Francisco Partners acquired 50% of Perforce, becoming an equal partner with Clearlake Capital.
In September 2019, Perforce Software was awarded the 2019 Computer Entertainment Developers Conference Award for Engineering for Helix Core.

Products

Perforce develops software used by software developers to manage code during the development process. The product line includes the following:

Helix Core

Helix Core, formerly Perforce Helix, is the company's version control software for large scale development environments. The Helix Version Control System manages a central database and a master of file versions.
Helix Core clients fall into roughly five categories: Git, command, GUI, web, and plugin. The Perforce system can make part or all of its content available as Git repositories. Users of Git and of other clients can work with the same file content and history. Git commits are visible to users of other clients as Perforce changelists, and vice versa. Users submit changed files together in changelists, which are applied as atomic commits.
The server and client software are released as pre-built executables for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and other operating systems.

Helix ALM

Helix ALM, formerly TestTrack, is a suite of tools used for application lifecycle management, allowing developers to manage all their product and system development phases with one product. The software was originally developed by Seapine Software, which was acquired by Perforce and rebranded. Helix ALM provides a centralized suite of capabilities for managing requirements, defects, issues and testing throughout the software development cycle.
There are three components of the suite:
The company develops the Helix QAC static code analysis software tool for the C and C++ programming languages.

Other products

With the January 2019 Rogue Wave acquisition, Perforce acquired the following products:
Perforce's customers are software developers at a wide variety of companies, including Netflix, SAP, Disney, Intuit and the NYSE. The company is considered a leader in the gaming space, with 18 of the top 20 games developers including Ubisoft and Electronic Arts using Perforce version control.

Offices

The company is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and as of November 2017, listed additional offices in Alameda, California; Mason, Ohio; Hallbergmoos, Germany; Helsinki, Finland; Sydney, Australia; Uppsala, Sweden; and Wokingham, England.