Perforce

Perforce Software, Inc. is an American 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 based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is equally owned by private equity firms Clearlake Capital and Francisco Partners. 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 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 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 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 (ALM) 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.