Emerson officials say that the development of the Trellis platform has has been a major initiative for the company.

Emerson began talking about Trellis nearly two years ago, not long after it acquired Aperture Corp for an undisclosed sum in 2008, and Avocent Corp. for $1.2 billion in 2009.

Both firms made tools for monitoring and managing various pieces of data center infrastructures.

Steve Hassell, president of Emerson Network Power's Avocent business, said the Trellis platform consists of more than a million lines of code, and involved shrinking down technology long managed via a KVM switch to a size that can be managed on a chip.

The platform includes a universal management gateway that acts as a translator to gather proprietary or open information from any device in a data center and convert it into data supported by Trellis.