Headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, privately held Guardian Industries Corp. has over 18,000 employees worldwide in twenty-five countries on five continents. Guardian is one of the world's largest manufacturers of float glass, which is a sheet of glass made by floating molten glass on a bed of molten tin. Modern windows and virtually all flat glass products for commercial, residential and automotive applications are made from float glass.

Architects and engineers must consider the aesthetic appearance of glass, how much light, heat and solar energy are permitted to pass through, the insulating properties of the glass, as well as the possibilities for heat absorption and thermal stress when designing a building. Guardian Industries' engineers developed a client-server application to calculate the performance characteristics of almost any glass configuration an architect might consider. The application was originally utilized by Guardian technical and sales people, but over time it was shared with an increasing number of Guardian customers via a Citrix connection.

The popularity of the application convinced Guardian that it should be re-written as a Web application to be shared with a much broader base of users.