Customer Comments

See what people are saying about Perforce and our technical support.

NVIDIA | California

"We currently have over 3000 licenses in use, 57GB of file data spanning more than 350,000 files. Our current changelist is over 800,000. We have users distributed through several continents (though most are in the US), using clients on WinNT, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Our Perforce server has 8 900 MHZ processors with 96MB of RAM running Solaris 8 It is connected to a Network Appliance for disk storage.

"Since starting up the Perforce server in 1997, we've had virtually zero downtime. In all cases, Perforce support has done a stellar job of getting us back up and running. The tool does a great job, and, although it does have its quirks, I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone who is looking for good source control and software release management.

"There are still a couple of minor features that I've requested of the Perforce folks, but most things I've requested do eventually get into the product.

"Perforce is absolutely the only tool I would trust to manage our source code."
Nick Triantos

Palm | California

"I have used several other SCM systems before Perforce, and each of them were difficult to set up, administer, and maintain. Perforce was exquisitely simple to set up, and has required very little administration since. In addition, the inherent simplicity of the Perforce model, meant that we didn't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on training and consulting. When I finally needed to call Perforce technical support, it was refreshing to actually reach a real, live person, without going through a phone system that starts off "All technical support personnel are currently busy". In fact, I have always reached someone that was able to either help me immediately (which was the majority of cases), or was able to begin the process of creating a solution."
Jeff Parrish

BBC News Interactive | UK

"Many thanks. I confess I could have just looked it up myself in the docs, but Perforce support is so perfect I couldn't resist the opportunity of seeing it in action again."
Mike Scott

TomTom | Netherlands

"Perforce has proven to be a vital tool for our development department. It helps us to keep a firm grip on the growing number of projects that are being simultaneously developed. Perforce is stable, fully scriptable and requires only minimal administration. The speed of support is unparalleled."
Rene Verschoor

Sybase | France

"Initially, when we were informed that we would be using Perforce, we groaned, "Not another source control system -- we've already had enough problems." But as we started looking at Perforce our horror changed to delight. Here was a source code control system which was fast, small, efficient, and easy to use. Since then, our experience has been nothing but positive. The team used to be particularly wary of multiple checkouts of the same file - today we have people working on the same files all the time, and our productivity is that much higher. Perforce has been a breath of fresh air: a product which does what it's supposed to do and does it well."
Scott Buchholz

Sun Microsystems | Australia

"It has been great to watch your product mature! On behalf of Sun Microsystems Australia and UCMcentral, I'd like to thank you for the great work you are doing. It's refreshing to see a great solution that has avoided the traps of complexity and bloatware. In my position as a CM consultant, I have used a great many version control tools. However none have got the mix of maturity, reliability and simplicity that your product displays. Your product is proving invaluable as Sun Australia (& its clients) move toward a fully mature UCM solution."
Niall Crawford

Macromedia | California

"The quick response is very much appreciated! Of course, I should have known we'd get such exemplary service... we're talking about Perforce here."
Lori Lustig

Gemstar TV Guide | California

"I like to acknowledge every one over at Perforce Customer Support team who have been helping me for the past couple of days. It has been a delight and pleasure journey having the team help me out with some of the recent issues we have been having. The Support engineers have the "Above and Beyond" attitude when it comes to helping the customers and they go out of their way. Your technical knowledge is admirable and I have learned a lot just in such a short time interacting with some of you guys. On behalf of TV Guide I like to thank you all and also congratulate such a professional Support team."
Omid K

Mintera | Massachussets

"I just wanted to thank the Perforce team for making such an awesome source code control system. I upgraded Mintera's server to 2005.2/94595 from P4D/NTX86/2002.2/40318 last month and the new server is lightning fast! What an elegant upgrade, and our metadata shrank 30%!"
Elan Riesman

Natural Convergence Inc. | Canada

"The Perforce Plug-in for WebSphere Studio (P4WSAD) is an excellent product. By allowing me to focus on my work, instead of having to focus on code management, it has improved my productivity over just using Eclipse and P4Win. The rest of our Eclipse users don't even realize how good it is, as they're so accustomed to using it."
Jay Glanville

Actuate | California

"I have to say I am pretty impressed with Perforce and the support. I started working with Perforce [five days ago] and it's very easy to pick up. The commands are intuitive and the docs are easy to understand."
Joe Keegan

Atheros Communications | California

"Prompt and correct as usual. Whenever I talk about the kind of service provided by our various CAD tool vendors, Perforce is the standard against which all are measured."
Jeff Smith

Bowne Global | Japan

"We have been using your software for the last year and have been extremely happy with it. No problems, easy-to-use, very customizable -- supporting all we need to do. I am hoping that my company will implement it world-wide. Thank you for a great piece of stable software that works the way it is supposed to."
Marc Silverman

College of Charleston | South Carolina

"Most Open Source projects use CVS for their source code control. But from my industry experience, CVS is not an industrial-grade SCCS - lacking several features crucial to large-scale development. Having run projects before using Perforce, I know that it is a complex, robust system that is an excellent example of an industrial SCCS. I believe that hands-on experience with Perforce will also help my students in their upcoming job hunt."
Jerry Boetje

Cosmo Software, an SGI company | California

"We're very impressed. We've tested at least 15 different packages to do source control, and Perforce is the only one we can even use -- the rest fail miserably on one test or another (too complex, too broken, too monolithic, too slow, didn't work remotely, required this or that). Basically, Occam's razor says they all lose hands-down when compared to Perforce."
Greg Spencer

Digital Illusion CE | Sweden

"Thanks for a great product (you can never say it enough times)."
Henrik Karlsson

Geac | California

"Einstein said the speed of light is the highest in the universe. It looks like you are faster. You saved me time to dig up all three of these answers, and all is more than clear.

"I have used and supported Perforce daily for more than six years here at Geac and, through your technical support and your online documentation, my task is a pleasant one."
Carmen Enachescu

Game Coding Complete | Texas

"I've used this product for years and it's never let me down. For any of you lucky enough to move from SourceSafe to Perforce, the first thing you'll notice is its speed. It's damn fast.

The architecture simply blows the pants off anything that uses the network directory hierarchy. More than storing the current status of each version of each file, it even stores the status of each file for everyone who has a client connection. That's why most SourceSafe slaves freak out when they use Perforce the first time; it's so fast they don't believe its actually doing anything. Of course, this makes remote access as fast as it can possibly be.

Perforce also has a nice GUI for anyone who doesn't want to use the command line."
Mike McShaffry

Irrational Games Australia | Australia

"We now have our entire team - programmers, artists and designers - using Perforce. So far we are very impressed with the quality of the software and the service we have received from your company."
Tony Oakden

Marrakech Ltd. | Ireland

"We are very happy with Perforce. It really was the right choice of application for Marrakech. We really haven't had any problems of any significance with it...and those problems we did have were immediately resolved by the excellent technical support."
Margaret Kennedy

Meeting Maker | Massachussets

"As always, you guys rock. I have dealt with many support groups and worked in one. Never have I encountered an organization as capable and competent as you guys. If you don't have a tech note on it, you have a solution. In addition, you also have a product that is very well designed. The fact that I don't have to upgrade the server when I upgrade the clients or visa versa, makes my life so much easier. I hope your competition cowers when you guys walk in to the room, because your product and organization are pretty stellar."
Peter Kahn

Mordent Software | Massachussets

"Thanks so much for the free software license for our project. We really appreciate your company supporting free software development!"
Mike Moretti

Mycom International | France

"Once again, everybody is stunned by your speed-of-light response times!"
Phillipe Bonneau

NetMotion Wireless | Washington

"I've been developing software since 1984, on UNIX, VMS, VOS, DOS, Windows and now LINUX. I've used RCS, SSCS, PVCS^® and other tools I don't even remember the names of. Perforce provides an increased level of real usefulness for our day to day development that I appreciate every time I use it. Thanks."
Michael S. Jackson

NetNote International | Ireland

"All of our software team find Perforce to be a great piece of software; it certainly leaves ClearCase and CVS in the dust."
Justin Mason

Paul F. Dubois, Scientific Programming

"Perforce service continues to be the best of any company I deal with."
Paul F. Dubois

The Savage Beast | California

"I am astounded by your response to my question. You did three things well:

You answered the question that I asked, not some other one;
You answered it thoroughly;
You answered it swiftly;
You answered it correctly.

"Wait -- that's four things that rarely happen! I feel like I've hit the tech support jackpot! AND It was not an accident that your product was the first item on our list of things to buy. Hmmm... You could make a sales campaign around that -- "What's the first thing to buy when starting a new company? Perforce, of course.""
Jeff Stearns

Seascape Communications | California

"There's nothing quite like a Customer Service department that anticipates your needs. I'm continually impressed with you guys!"
Chris Schaefer

Seeing Machines | Australia

"Thank you, I have to say your product is as awesome as your support."
Rayyan Sultani

SGI | California

"We are using Perforce to manage the data associated with multi-million transistor ASICS for our next generation advanced graphics systems.

"We have integrated Perforce as the DM system for the Cadence DFII design tools and are thus able to manage the logical and physical data together which was impossible in the past since software developers and VLSI engineers have not been able to share a common SCM tool.

"We use branches extensively to snap-shot the evolving designs which ensures netlist and layout consistency as well as providing insulation from library and flow changes. The ability to make automatic, incremental updates to the snap-shots through forward and reverse integration is a big productivity win.

"The combination of Perforce and Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 servers provides an extremely high performance 64bit solution.

"The scalability, reliability and ease of administration is very impressive -- 135,000+ changes and 14 GB later, the tool is just as fast as it was on Day One and we have experienced close to zero down time with minimal administration overhead."
Shiv Sikand

Sproing | Austria

"I also wanted to mention that we are really happy with perforce, the decision was to use it in our processes was a really good one."
Gerhard Seiler

Stephen J. Friedl, Software Consultant | California

"I have been using Perforce at a customer site for some time, and it's really just damn wonderful software. I wouldn't use CVS even if it were free. I hope I execute in my area as well as you do in yours.

"Make no mistake, I prefer P4 to MKS like I prefer a Pentium over an abacus..."
Stephen Friedl

StorageTek | Colorado

"You guys are GREAT! I'm always impressed with your quick response, and thorough answers to my questions! Thank you very much!"
Sharon Penny

TeraCloud | Washington

"I can't say enough about the Perforce product. It's amazing. It does everything it should and more, and in a way one would expect a source control product to function. Perforce has made it onto my list of must-have utilities and applications."
Benjamin Werle

Total Phase | California

"In our software consulting practice, we like to promote products that solve our clients' problems effectively and efficiently. Configuration management is a large part of good software process. Perforce steps up to the challenge, providing a clean and efficient tool that saves our clients time and money."
Kumaran Santhanam

Vignette |Texas

"Awesome product!"
Rick Vestal

VirtualSelf | Israel

"We are extremely pleased with Perforce. After working with SourceSafe, StarTeam and CVS, Perforce is a pure delight."
Shmulik Regev

Voice Signal Technologies | Massachusetts

"Thank you very much for your help. Your response and that of another Perforce Tech Support person, both of them quick and helpful, have been of great assistance in convincing the CFO that a Tech Support contract is not a waste of money."
Paul van Mulbregt

WaveSat Telecom | Canada

"Now that I have changed companies and am using another SCM system instead of Perforce, I just wanted to let you guys know that I now appreciate Perforce more than ever. Yes, Perforce is faster, but I'm a patient man. I miss the atomicity of check-ins. I miss distinguishing between delete and obliterate. I don't recall just now why I've said on so many occasions, "I wish we had Perforce." What I miss most is the Perforce Windows GUI. I liked being able to look back at the comments associated with all of the check-ins associated with a (sub-)group of files. I liked the grouping of information; I'm a visual person. And of course, with every call to Perforce tech. support I was surprised anew to find that I'm dealing with a human: friendly. That's not normal today."
Jeffrey Blezius - formerly of Wavesat Telecom

WebCollage | New York

"We have decided to buy your tool, and here are the reasons for the decision (in order of priority):

Support for transactional submits
Sandboxing a developer is possible (where "Shares"/branches from other folders are not automatically reflected)
A product that understands programmers
A no-baloney site which is not full of marketing (just the right amount) and where you can fully understand what you buy before you buy it
Uncompromising support
Oh, and the mailing list is very helpful too."

Gil Tayar

WebLogic | California

"We have been using a single Perforce repository from everywhere on our wide-area network, not only for source code control and configuration management, but also for managing our documentation and web pages, and for groupware-style document sharing. Because it uses a connection-based client-server model, has low network overhead and runs on a wide variety of platforms, Perforce has helped make our heterogeneous distributed office a reality."
Bob Pasker

Works | Texas

"We really love your product and have recommended it to several other companies that we come in contact with... Mostly developers whine about the source control systems they're forced to use, so they are intrigued when our developers wax poetic about Perforce. Our team truly does rave about your product."
Todd Praisner

For more comments, read selected Technical Briefs from our customers.

^*PVCS is a trademark of Serena Software, Inc.