Xytronix Research & Design, Inc. was founded in 1999 by David Witbeck as a contract engineering company in West Jordan, Utah. They initially worked on various projects, gaining a wide range of experience and expertise. After a few years, the company began developing advanced industrial control systems using a distributed computing architecture over a field-bus network. Finding the field-bus network inefficient, they decided to replace it with Ethernet, leading to the creation of the ControlByWeb concept. This resulted in the development of WebRelay, their first web-controlled relay product.