Case Study: Global Investment Bank cuts annual VCS costs from $500,000 to $150,000 and boosts developer productivity with Perforce Helix

Global Investment Bank 'Reaping the Rewards' After Migrating from ClearCase

A Fortune 100 global investment bank’s quantitative analytics group of about 100 quants, supporting 1,000+ software components and a 20 GB/1M+ file repository, needed to replace Rational ClearCase to gain better scalability, performance, auditability and support for mixed development models without disrupting workflows. The legacy system was costly to run (~$500,000/year), slow for distributed teams, and difficult for non‑specialist developers to use, so the team sought a modern, enterprise-ready version management solution that preserved historical data and met internal audit requirements.

Working with Perforce, the group migrated more than a decade of ClearCase history to Helix Core, achieving a projected annual cost reduction from ~$500,000 to ~$150,000, faster operations (large check-ins reduced from hours to minutes; some tasks cut from ~20 minutes to ~2), and improved developer productivity (conservative estimate 2.5%, expected 10%+). Helix delivered the needed flexibility, cloud-friendly scalability, strong audit trails, and responsive support, and the team plans to adopt additional Helix features such as streams and sandboxes to further streamline workflows.

Global investment bank