2024 Outlook with Adam Olson of Perforce

Perforce is a company that provides software solutions primarily focused on version control, especially for large-scale development projects. Version control systems manage changes to documents, computer programs, large web sites, or other collections of information. Perforce’s main product is Helix Core, formerly known as Perforce Helix, which is a version control system that helps software development teams manage and track changes to their source code, documents, and other digital assets. It is widely used in industries such as game development, automotive, aerospace, and finance where managing complex software projects with many contributors is essential.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company. 
Adam Olson, Chief Revenue Officer and General Manager for the Digital Creation business unit at Perforce, which includes our integrated semiconductor solutions, Helix Core and Helix IPLM (formerly Methodics).

What was the most exciting high point of 2023 for your company? 
We had several major account wins within our Digital Creation business unit and expanded our DevOps portfolio. Perforce also appointed a new CEO at the very end of 2023, which we’re very excited about. Technology veteran Jim Cassens brings to Perforce over 30 years of experience scaling software organizations with a customer-centric management approach. We’re thrilled to have him leading the organization.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2023? 
Some of our larger semiconductor customers were facing economic headwinds heading into 2023, which slowed their projects. While these headwinds eased up a bit by the end of the year, the challenges and complexities of the semiconductor industry remain. We find that what may have looked like a relatively mundane decision in the past is now met with larger committees and a need for strong defense of ROI models.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge? 
Perforce is helping our semiconductor clients tame complexity and increase efficiencies across their design flow. We help them accomplish more with less and accelerate time to market, while keeping a lid on costs. Perforce Helix IPLM and Helix Core serve as a scalable, secure foundation for design data management. By tracking all IP and design data in Helix IPLM’s unified, hierarchical data model, our customers benefit from tighter coordination between cross-functional teams, end-to-end traceability, and more efficient requirements verification. And with Helix Core, they get robust, federated, multisite data management for enterprise scale, security, and performance.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2024 will be, and why? 
Semiconductor IP security will be a big factor in 2024 as global instability and political uncertainty rises and bad actors spend more time trying to compromise networks and other important infrastructure. Organizations – and global, multi-site teams in particular – will need to carefully track and secure design assets to avoid violating rapidly shifting technology restrictions and export control laws. Such violations, often caused by accidental IP leakage, can result in millions of dollars in fines and legal issues, on top of the lost revenue and market setbacks.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth? 
Perforce is addressing this growing need for IP security through advanced new features like Geofencing as well as providing fine-grained security and enabling end-to-end traceability across the lifecycle. Helix IPLM’s Geofencing feature delivers dynamic security for global, multi-site teams by restricting IP availability in certain geos, regardless of user access permissions. These restrictions can be applied universally – regardless of the underlying data management systems (Perforce Helix Core, Git, DesignSync, etc). Within Helix Core, organizations can control access down to the file level and even qualify access by IP address.

What conferences did you attend in 2023 and how was the traffic?
Our Digital Creation team attended and exhibited at Embedded World and DAC. We had heavy traffic at our booth at both events – substantially more than the previous year, when conference attendance was still affected by the pandemic. We also attended the GSA Executive Forums in Europe and the US, along with Design & Reuse IP-SoC Silicon Valley.

Will you attend conferences in 2024? Same or more?
We’ll be attending the same conferences in 2024, along with a few others such as GOMACTech and DVCon.

Additional questions or final comments? 
Perforce welcomes semiconductor leaders to join our Helix IPLM Monthly User Group (MUG) sessions. It’s a great opportunity to hear from product experts, industry peers, and Helix IPLM users about topics like IP governance, release automation, and IP security, along with best practices and the latest product features. To register, visit https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-iplm/user-group.

Also Read:

The Transformation Model for IP-Centric Design

Chiplets and IP and the Trust Problem

Insights into DevOps Trends in Hardware Design