Perforce, legally Perforce Software, Inc., is an American developer of software used for developing and running applications, including

version control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

software, web-based repository management, developer collaboration,

application lifecycle management Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management ( governance, development, and maintenance) of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software tes ...

, web application servers, debugging tools and Agile planning software. The company is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is equally owned by private equity firms Clearlake Capital and

Francisco Partners Francisco Partners is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. Founded in August 1999 and based in San Francisco with offices in London and New York City, Franci ...

History

Perforce Software was founded in 1995 in

Alameda, California Alameda ( ; ; Spanish for " tree-lined path") is a city in Alameda County, California, located in the East Bay region of the Bay Area. The city is primarily located on Alameda Island, but also spans Bay Farm Island and Coast Guard Island, as we ...

by Christopher Seiwald, a software developer and computer science graduate from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

. 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 geographic 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. In March 2015, the company renamed its product to Perforce Helix, which now supported

distributed development A distributed development project is a research and development (R&D) project that is done across multiple business worksites or locations. It is a form of R&D where the project members may not see each other face to face, but they are all workin ...

and included security features allowing suspicious usage tracking. Helix's security capabilities included IP threat detection, co-developed with analytics vendor Interset. In October, the company collaborated with

GitLab GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer ...

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

(ALM) tools. Seapine's TestTrack ALM software was rebranded as Helix ALM. In September 2017, the company acquired

Uppsala, Sweden Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inhabitants in 2019. Located north of the c ...

-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 (PRQA), a

static code analysis In computer science, static program analysis (or static analysis) is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution. The term ...

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 January 2019, Perforce announced the acquisition of Rogue Wave Software, a software company with a focus on development tools for

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...

. In April, private equity firm Francisco Partners acquired 50% of Perforce, becoming an equal partner with Clearlake Capital. In September, Perforce Software was awarded the 2019 Computer Entertainment Developers Conference (CEDEC) Award for Engineering for Helix Core. In June 2020, Perforce acquired software developer TestCraft Technologies, a provider of automated

Selenium Selenium is a chemical element with the symbol Se and atomic number 34. It is a nonmetal (more rarely considered a metalloid) with properties that are intermediate between the elements above and below in the periodic table, sulfur and telluriu ...

-based web application testing. In July, Perforce acquired software developer Methodics, a DevOps software provider of intellectual property life cycle management for semiconductor companies. In October 2021, Perforce agreed to buy

BlazeMeter markets a commercial, self-service load testing platform as a service (PaaS), which is compatible with open-source Apache JMeter, the performance testing framework from the Apache Software Foundation. BlazeMeter was founded in 2011, and was ...

testing platform from

Broadcom Inc Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

for an undisclosed sum. In April 2022, Perforce acquired the

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populou ...

-based infrastructure automation software platform,

Puppet A puppet is an object, often resembling a human, animal or Legendary creature, mythical figure, that is animated or manipulated by a person called a puppeteer. The puppeteer uses movements of their hands, arms, or control devices such as rods ...

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

software for large scale development environments. The Helix Version Control System manages a central

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

and a master

repository Repository may refer to: Archives and online databases * Content repository, a database with an associated set of data management tools, allowing application-independent access to the content * Disciplinary repository (or subject repository), a ...

of file versions. Helix Core clients fall into roughly five categories: Git,

command Command may refer to: Computing * Command (computing), a statement in a computer language * COMMAND.COM, the default operating system shell and command-line interpreter for DOS * Command key, a modifier key on Apple Macintosh computer keyboards ...

, GUI,

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created b ...

, 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

executable In computing, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions", as opposed to a data fil ...

s for Microsoft Windows,

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, Solaris,

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

, and other

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

Helix ALM

Helix ALM, formerly TestTrack, is a suite of tools used for application lifecycle management (ALM), 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: *Helix RM for requirements management *Helix IM for issue tracking and management *Helix TCM for test case management

Helix QAC

The company develops the Helix QAC

software tool for the C and C++ programming languages.

Other products and services

*Helix TeamHub is a code and artifact hosting and developer collaboration tool that supports development in Git environments, in addition to

Apache Subversion Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name ''svn'') is a software versioning and revision control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and hist ...

and

Mercurial Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalabilit ...

. *Helix Swarm is a development tool integrated with Helix Core, that allows geographically dispersed developers to coordinate their code review. *Hansoft is software used to support agile software development. *Perfecto is a testing platform for desktop and mobile apps. *TestCraft is an automated Selenium-based web application testing platform.

Acquired Rogue Wave Software products and services

With the January 2019 Rogue Wave acquisition, Perforce acquired the following products: * Akana - a provider of computer software products for application programming interface (API) management *CodeDynamics - a software tool for dynamic code analysis * Gliffy - software for diagramming via an

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HT ...

cloud-based Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

app *HostAccess - a suite of terminal emulation products for Windows *HydraExpress - a framework for creating C++ Web services from existing C++ code * IMSL Numerical Libraries - a commercial collection of

software libraries In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subro ...

numerical analysis Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of numerical methods th ...

functionality for computer programming * PV-WAVE - an array oriented fourth-generation programming language used to build and deploy visual data analysis applications *JRebel and XRebel - Java development and performance management tools for software developers * Klocwork - a

tool *SourcePro - software that enables developers to build C++ apps using common APIs that can be migrated from one platform to another *Stingray - a tool for developing object oriented front ends for Windows programming *TotalView for HPC - Debugging software for C/C++, Fortran, and Mixed-Language Python Applications *Visualization - data visualization tools to assist with application development, including a GUI builder and data management abstraction capabilities * Zend Server - a web application server for running and managing

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

applications * Zend Studio - a commercial, proprietary

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

(IDE) for

In addition, Perforce also acquired OpenLogic, a consulting organization with expertise in open source software from Rogue Wave.

Customers

Perforce's customers are software developers at a wide variety of companies, including

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American Cloud computing, cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketi ...

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a ...

SAP Sap is a fluid transported in xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a separ ...

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

Intuit Intuit Inc. is an American business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application Tu ...

and the

NYSE The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed co ...

. The company is considered a leader in the gaming space, with 18 of the top 20 games developers including

Ubisoft Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include ''Assassin's Creed'', '' Far Cry'', ...

and

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted th ...

using Perforce version control.

Offices

The company is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with additional offices worldwide.

References

External links

*{{Official website, www.perforce.com Software companies established in 1995 American companies established in 1995 1995 establishments in California Companies based in Minneapolis Software companies based in Minneapolis Software companies based in Minnesota Cloud platforms Git (software) Cloud computing providers Privately held companies based in Minnesota 2018 mergers and acquisitions Private equity portfolio companies Software companies of the United States