What is Perforce Delphix?

I have spent years working alongside enterprise leaders who face a common dilemma: the need to innovate faster while contending with strict compliance regulations and soaring infrastructure costs. 

In my experience, the biggest bottleneck isn’t a lack of ideas or talent. It’s data. Teams wait days or weeks for the data they need to build and test. 

That’s why I am excited to share how Perforce Delphix solves this challenge. We help you deliver fast, trusted, AI-ready data — anywhere — so your teams can focus on what matters most: innovation.

What is Delphix?

Perforce Delphix is the intelligent data automation platform that accelerates development speed, delivers software quality, and ensures data compliance and security. By unifying data delivery, governance, and compliance into a single secure platform, Delphix helps enterprises modernize across multicloud and hybrid environments.

Who is Delphix as a Company?

Delphix is part of Perforce Software.

Enterprises around the world choose Delphix to automate compliant data for DevOps.

Businesses must innovate quickly but struggle to balance speed with quality and compliance. The Delphix DevOps Data Platform provides integrated data masking and database virtualization to rapidly deploy compliant, production-like  data into non-production environments across private, public, and hybrid clouds.

With Delphix, customers automate test data management and CI/CD, create pipelines , and swiftly recover from downtime events such as ransomware, while ensuring data privacy and governance.

Perforce is the DevOps company for global teams looking for speed, quality, security, and compliance at scale along the development lifecycle. Perforce acquired Delphix in early 2024.

What Does Delphix Do?

The Delphix DevOps Data Platform helps IT operations, application development, quality assurance, and analytics teams automate data management.

If you want a deep dive, my colleagues Matt Yeh and Stuart Williams offer an excellent explainer:

Key Delphix Use Cases

Database Virtualization

Delphix empowers your company to clone databases in minutes regardless of the size — without duplicating storage. This reduces data footprints by 10x and accelerates provisioning by 100x. The result? Faster development speed. 

To learn more about this use case, explore Delphix's data virtualization and delivery capabilities >>

Data Masking & Compliance

Delphix empowers your company to mask sensitive data from production databases and deploy it to lower environments quickly. This eliminates sensitive data risks and ensures compliance with regulations — without sacrificing speed or quality. 

To learn more about this use case, explore Delphix’s data masking and compliance capabilities >>

Test Data Management

Delphix provisions test data efficiently, allowing your company to test often and early with realistic, compliant test data. The result? Increase project velocity by 2x and improve software quality.

To learn more about this use case, explore Delphix's test data management capabilities >>

AI & Analytics Compliance

We know that modern enterprises need more than just test data; they need data for intelligence. Delphix delivers compliant, high-quality data wherever you need it across analytics and AI initiatives. You can accelerate innovation securely with AI-powered synthetic and masked data for DevOps without slowing down your teams.

To learn more about this use case, explore Delphix's AI and analytics compliance capabilities >>

Gartner Peer Insights™ Customers' Choice for the 2025 Voice of the Customer for Test Data Management

Perforce Delphix was recently cited as a Gartner Peer Insights™ Customers' Choice in the 2025 Voice of the Customer for Test Data Management*.

Find Out Why

 

*Gartner, Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Test Data Management, Peer Contributors, August 2025

How Does Delphix Compare to the Competition?

You might wonder how Delphix stacks up against other approaches, such as custom scripts, standalone masking tools, or MicroDB/Fabric-based tools. Unlike point solutions that only solve one part of the puzzle, Delphix provides a comprehensive, enterprise-ready platform.

It combines data masking, virtualization, synthetic data, and delivery into one scalable solution. This allows you to automate compliant data to power DevOps and AI innovation, rather than piecing together disparate tools that create friction and risk.

Compare Delphix vs. other data management alternatives >>

Key Delphix Capabilities

Delphix allows you to make fully read-writeable clones of your production database in lower environments in minutes using virtually no storage for each additional copy.

Delphix also has the industry's most sophisticated data masking solution so you can easily discover and mask any sensitive data, replacing it with fictitious data. This allows you to have full lookalike copies of your production database in your lower environments in a fraction of the time it normally takes to copy production down to non-production — and at a fraction of the cost of normal database copies.

Connect Data

Delphix allows you to connect with your key data sources, such as:

• Traditional databases like Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Postgres, DB2, etc.
• No SQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, Cockroach, etc.
• Analytical sources like Snowflake or Databricks.
• Cloud sources like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
• And many more.

Virtualize Databases and Mask Data for Compliance

Delphix virtualizes full databases and masks sensitive data like personal identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) in compliance with longstanding data privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, as well as new regulations like DORA and the EU AI Act.

Deploy Quality Data Fast

Masked data can then be quickly deployed to downstream development and testing teams. These teams are then able to use production-like data in non-production environments. The quality of data is assured because masking results in realistic data preserving referential integrity across tables and databases. And the teams using the data can do so without introducing security or compliance risks.

How Does Delphix Work?

1. Install Delphix Components

Delphix has two main components: database virtualization and data masking.

These components can be installed independently or together. You can either download the components as VM images or deploy them to your cloud provider as a machine image from the cloud provider’s marketplace.

The Delphix virtualization appliance is a virtual appliance that lives between your database management system (DBMS) instances and the storage layer.

2. Connect Your Databases

Getting production data into the Delphix virtualization appliance involves either:

• A connection to the production database where Delphix ingests the data from using the database’s native backup process (by using RMAN or Microsoft SQL native backups, for example).
• Via a third-party backup restore process where a backup is restored to a staging server attached to the Delphix appliance.

Once the backups are replayed into the Delphix appliance, Delphix creates a continual flow of changes from the production instance — using incremental or full backups in an automated fashion.

3. Save on Database Sizes Fast

Once a database is ingested into Delphix, it is typically compressed to a third of the original size. Once ingested, users can then mount virtual databases (VDBs) to target DBMS in your lower environment.

Delphix will orchestrate a network connection to the target DBMS and mount a set of data files representing the desired database at any desired point in the database's timeline. This allows users to provision a new copy of a database in a few minutes regardless of the size of the database.

We have customers with databases that are over 1 PETABYTE that create a fully independent, read-/writeable copy in lower environments in under 5 minutes!

4. Empower Developers and Testers

In addition to significantly increased speed in provisioning the database, Delphix also provides a significant advantage in the way of self-service controls. Developers and testers can self-administer the virtual database to refresh it to the latest image, rewind it to a previous version, or bookmark and share a virtual database with another user.

5. Automate Compliant Data in DevOps Pipelines

Delphix is built API-first, and all the functions are available as simple commands. This allows teams to easily embed database functions into your DevOps build pipelines. Customers can provision databases into ephemeral environments in minutes as part of a pipeline job. They can re-baseline their database — picking up database changes that have been checked into a build and deploying them to the latest clone of the production database — simulating a production deployment as part of a unit test.

Delphix allows you to get to true CI/CD with all your databases — without the wait and waste typically involved in backing up and restoring full copies. There is no better way to embed data quality and database development functions into automation pipelines.

IDC: The Business Value of Delphix

Find out how customers achieve 408% 3-year ROI.

Get the IDC White Paper

Who Uses Delphix?

The world’s largest enterprises rely on Delphix to innovate, accelerate, and comply. It is trusted by 3 of the top 5 financial institutions and 4 of the top 5 healthcare insurers. 

Here’s what some of our customers have achieved:

Worldpay

Worldpay, a financial services organization, uses Delphix to accelerate test cycles, improve quality, and mask sensitive data. By choosing Delphix, they were able to deliver: 

• 85% faster data delivery, reducing a 28-day process to just 4.
• Higher software quality from timely, complete test environments.
• Improved security and compliance across 12+ non-prod environments.

Delta Dental

Before Delta Dental, an insurance provider, began using Delphix, it would take eight weeks to extract data, and it was difficult to protect data for compliance. Now, they’re able to:

• Accelerate database migration timelines by 20%. 
• Move data to cloud environments in just hours, not weeks.
• Mask sensitive PII and PHI before replicating data to AWS.
• Deliver virtual data copies to a team of 200 developers in minutes.

Mattel

Mattel, a consumer goods company, uses Delphix to virtualize and modernize. With Delphix, they’ve reduced:

• Database refresh time from five days to 48 hours.
• Database size by 8 TB.
• Human hours by 600%.

Sky Italia

Sky Italia, a telecom company, uses Delphix to achieve regulatory compliance while improving security and test data management procedures.

By choosing Delphix, they:

• Achieved GDPR compliance in five months.
• Reduced infrastructure footprint by 90%.
• Reduced operational costs by 30%.

Choice Hotels

Choice Hotels, in the hospitality industry, uses Delphix to accelerate application building and automated testing while masking data. As a result, they have had:

• 90% faster database refreshes.
• Significant cost savings by minimizing database storage requirements.
• Improved software quality through consistent, repeatable testing.

Get Started with Delphix

With Delphix, there are no trade-offs necessary. Your company can have it all: compliance, quality, and speed.

Request a Delphix Demo

See for yourself how Delphix powers AI and DevOps innovation. Request a custom, no-pressure demo from our specialists. We will walk you through Delphix for your key use cases.

Request a Delphix Demo

This post was originally authored by Kyle Hailey and has been updated by Matthew Yeh and Aaron Jensen.