Vertiv Brand Guidelines: Liebert’s Ohio Cooling Lineage, Spun Out of Emerson in 2016

A garage prototype, an IBM introduction and an Ohio company.

Vertiv carries a name coined in 2016, but its lineage runs back to 1946 and to Columbus, Ohio. English Wikipedia says the business began that year as Capitol Refrigeration Industries, founded by Ralph Liebert, who built a prototype precision air conditioner in his garage. In early 1965, Wikipedia says, the prototype was shown to IBM in Chicago, and IBM arranged for Liebert to present it at a computer conference in Philadelphia.

Liebert Corporation was formed in 1965. English Wikipedia describes it as the industry’s first maker of computer room air conditioning, or CRAC, systems, and Vertiv’s own website says its history “began in 1965 as Liebert Corporation, a pioneer in precision computer room air conditioning.” The company moved into a new building in Worthington, Ohio, in 1968, set up a business in 1977 to make power distribution, conditioning and monitoring equipment for data processing, and broke ground for a second large plant in Delaware, Ohio, in 1980. It listed on NASDAQ in 1981. In 1983, Wikipedia says, it bought Programmed Power Corporation from Franklin Electric, which took it into uninterruptible power supplies, and opened its first factory outside North America, in Cork, Ireland.

Emerson Electric acquired Liebert in March 1987 and ran it as a wholly owned subsidiary. In 2000 Emerson gathered its critical-infrastructure businesses into a single unit, Emerson Network Power. Over the next decade that unit bought Knürr, a German maker of enclosure systems, in 2006, and then Avocent and the Chloride Group in 2009 and 2010, according to English Wikipedia.

A private-equity carve-out, a new name and a return to the stock market.

The break from Emerson came in December 2016. In a release dated 1 December 2016 and republished by Platinum Equity, Emerson said it had completed the sale of its Network Power business to Platinum Equity and a group of co-investors, keeping a subordinated interest, and that Network Power was “rebranding as Vertiv” to operate as a stand-alone company, then headquartered in Columbus. The release described its range as thermal management, AC and DC power, transfer switches, services and information management systems for the data centre and telecommunications industries.

The Australian technology site iTWire reported the rename the same week, noting that the sale had first been announced in August. It named the new chief executive as Rob Johnson, previously an operating partner at the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and earlier chief executive of American Power Conversion. To introduce the name, iTWire reported, the company unveiled a new website and planned an advertising campaign from January 2017 under the theme “Your Mission is Critical.”

Under private ownership the company kept reshaping itself. English Wikipedia says it sold its ASCO power-switch business to Schneider Electric in 2017 and bought Energy Labs, Geist and MEMS in 2018.

Vertiv returned to the stock market in February 2020. Through a business combination with GS Acquisition Holdings, a special purpose acquisition company, it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker VRT on Monday 10 February, according to its press release of that day, which presented the company as “Architects of Continuity.” Data Center Knowledge reported on 11 February 2020 that GS Acquisition Holdings had been formed by a Goldman Sachs affiliate and David Cote, the former Honeywell chief executive, who became Vertiv’s executive chairman; that Rob Johnson stayed on as chief executive; and that Platinum Equity went into the listing holding about 38 percent of the shares.

Power, cooling and the data hall.

The makers of uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution and precision cooling sell equipment that most people never see. It stands in plant rooms and data halls behind locked doors, so the companies tend to show it in place: long rows of grey cabinets under white light, battery strings racked floor to ceiling, switchgear with its doors open, and chillers and heat-rejection units lined up on rooftops and in yards outside.

The data hall itself has become the stock image of the trade. Photographs and renderings return again and again to cold-aisle containment, with server racks closed in behind glass doors and ceiling panels, to cooling units set between the racks, and to engineers with laptops checking a cabinet’s display. As computing loads have grown, liquid-cooling pipework, coolant units and prefabricated modules built off site have joined the cabinets in the pictures.

Factories, test laboratories and trade fairs supply the rest. These companies often show their own production lines and test bays, where equipment is run before it ships, and the industry gathers at events such as Data Centre World and the DCD conference series, where makers fill stands with UPS cabinets, cooling units and power distribution gear and present new ranges to data-centre operators and engineers. Corporate language leans on continuity: Vertiv, for example, presented itself as “Architects of Continuity” when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

The companies in this guide range from listed groups to family firms, and several carry long histories under changing owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A 2016 name over a 1965 product line.

Since the listing the company has kept growing through acquisitions and partnerships. English Wikipedia records the purchase of E+I Engineering, a maker of switchgear, busway and modular power systems, in 2021, and says Vertiv was added to the S&P 500 index in March 2026. It gives the headquarters as Westerville, Ohio, with regional headquarters in Switzerland, Shenzhen, Singapore and Thane in India, and lists manufacturing sites in Ohio, Nebraska and South Carolina, in Mexico, Ireland and Italy, in central Europe, the United Arab Emirates, India, China and Malaysia.

The Liebert name survives inside the brand. Vertiv’s website sells its uninterruptible power supplies as “Liebert® uninterruptible power supplies,” alongside room, row and rack cooling, liquid cooling, chillers, power distribution and the Avocent monitoring and management line. Its about page now frames the business around artificial intelligence, describing power, cooling, IT and services that “work in unison,” a portfolio called Vertiv 360AI, and collaborations with NVIDIA, Ansys, Compass Datacenters and Polar. English Wikipedia says Vertiv and NVIDIA released a reference architecture for NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 platform at the OCP Summit in October 2024, and that Vertiv announced collaborations with the fuel-cell maker Ballard Power Systems in 2024 and with Caterpillar in November 2025.

For a design guide, Vertiv shows how a corporate name created for a carve-out can sit over a much older product name: the umbrella brand dates from 2016, while Liebert, the founder’s surname, still labels the power equipment. Compare Schneider Electric, which bought Vertiv’s ASCO business, and Eaton, another American power-management group. For this guide we use a slate, a graphite and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vertiv’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.