The company is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is equally owned by private equity firms Clearlake Capital and Francisco Partners.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[21][22] In June 2020, Perforce acquired software developer TestCraft Technologies, a provider of automated Selenium-based web application testing.
The server and client software are released as pre-built executables for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and other operating systems.
[30] Helix ALM provides a centralized suite of capabilities for managing requirements, defects, issues and testing throughout the software development cycle.
[31] There are three components of the suite:[32] The company develops the Helix QAC static code analysis software tool for the C and C++ programming languages.