Wise Solutions
Wise Solutions, Inc. was an American company that made software tools for creating application installers. Their primary product, Wise was one of the most widely used installation packages for Windows. Their main competitor was InstallShield by Flexera Software. Wise Solutions was acquired and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Altiris, Inc. in December 2003. In April 2007, Altiris was acquired by Symantec Corporation.
Wise Solutions was started as a shareware tool originally distributed via CompuServe. Over time the company grew to roughly 300 employees spread across the headquarters in Plymouth, Michigan and a European office in The Hague, Netherlands. After the 2003 acquisition by Altiris the European office was consolidated with an existing European Altiris office. The Plymouth Michigan office is now primarily a regional software development and support site for existing Wise branded products and some Altiris branded products.
Wise Package Studio, the last remaining Wise product was End-of-Lifed by Symantec on November 7, 2011.
Legal issues
Corporate espionage
On June 27, 2003, InstallShield sued Wise Solutions, alleging electronic espionage.[1] The civil complaint listed the theft of nearly 1,000 confidential documents from the InstallShield corporate FTP site, including a customer list.[2] InstallShield detected the intrusion when decoy customers with addresses planted in InstallShield's customer-list started to receive marketing material from Wise Solutions. Reviews of FTP logs showed several connections over a period of 10 months from addresses related to Wise Solutions. This lawsuit also spawned an investigation by the FBI that resulted in the Plymouth headquarters being searched for evidence. The civil suit was resolved in July 2004 and the case was dismissed. Additionally, the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago sent a letter indicating that they did not intend to file criminal charges.[3]
Patent infringement
In more recent years InstallShield and Wise Solutions via their respective parent companies have had some disagreements over patent infringement, one of which ultimately resulted in a preemptive patent-infringement lawsuit by Macrovision against Altiris and Wise Solutions in which it not only claimed infringement by Altiris products but also asked (November 2006) for the court to find that it was not infringing on any Altiris or Wise Solutions patents.[4]