History
Perforce was founded in 1995 in Alameda, California by Christopher Seiwald, a software developer and computer science graduate from UC Berkeley.4 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.45
In June 2013, the company released P4 Code Review (formerly Helix Swarm), a tool for developers working in different geographic areas to collaborate on code review.6
In June 2014, the company released a version of its Perforce versioning engine, then known as P4D, which supported concurrency.7
In March 2015, the company renamed its product to Perforce Helix, which now supported distributed development and included security features allowing suspicious usage tracking.8 Helix's security capabilities included IP threat detection, co-developed with analytics vendor Interset.9 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.10
In February 2016, Seiwald sold the company to investment group Summit Partners, and Janet Dryer was named as new CEO.11 The company headquarters was relocated to Minneapolis.12 In November, Perforce announced the acquisition of Seapine Software, a provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) tools.13 Seapine's TestTrack ALM software was rebranded as Helix ALM and eventually Perforce ALM.14
In September 2017, the company acquired Uppsala, Sweden-based Hansoft, a developer of Agile planning software.15 Also in September, Perforce announced it had acquired Finnish repository management services company Deveo.16 Deveo's products were merged into Perforce TeamHub, its first solo venture for Git-based development teams.
In January 2018, Summit Partners sold Perforce to private equity firm Clearlake Capital.2 In May, Perforce acquired UK-based Programming Research (PRQA), a static code analysis firm.17 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.18 In October, the company acquired mobile and web automation testing company Perfecto.19
In January 2019, Perforce announced the acquisition of Rogue Wave Software, a software company with a focus on development tools for high-performance computing.20 In April, private equity firm Francisco Partners acquired 50% of Perforce, becoming an equal partner with Clearlake Capital.3 In September, Perforce Software was awarded the 2019 Computer Entertainment Developers Conference (CEDEC) Award for Engineering for P4 (formerly Helix Core).2122
In June 2020, Perforce acquired software developer TestCraft Technologies, a provider of automated Selenium-based web application testing.23 In July, Perforce acquired software developer Methodics, a DevOps software provider of intellectual property life cycle management for semiconductor companies.24
In October 2021, Perforce agreed to buy BlazeMeter testing platform from Broadcom Inc for an undisclosed sum.25
In April 2022, Perforce acquired the Portland, Oregon-based infrastructure automation software platform, Puppet.261
In March 2024, Perforce acquired the Redwood City, California-based test data management software, Delphix.27
Products
Perforce develops software used by software developers to manage code during the development process. The product line includes the following:
P4
Perforce P4 (formerly Helix Core) is the company's version control software for large scale development environments.29 The P4 Version Control System manages a central database and a master repository of file versions.
P4 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, , and other .
