Las Vegas: The head of EMC’s newly-formed Pivotal subsidiary said that the company will be looking to keep an open approach as it builds its cloud computing platform.

Paul Maritz told attendees at the company’s annual partner conference that the upcoming Pivotal platforms will look to provide users with support for any number of popular cloud platforms and service providers.

The Pivotal boss said that the company is hoping to a void a replay of history as it oversees what executives describe as a third “era” in enterprise computing. While the first era was described as the use of mainframes and terminals and the second era a transition to networked PCs and servers, EMC believes that the third era will be one of mobile devices, cloud computing and big data.

“We don’t want this third generation of applications to go back to like being the first generation,” Maritz said, noting the common mainframe practice of locking users into a single brand for their entire infrastructure.

“We don’t want you to build an app in Amazon’s cloud and have to pay Amazon a tax for the rest of its lifecycle.”

Rather, Pivotal hopes to make its big data platform more akin to Linux, the open source operating system which runs on virtually all enterprise server hardware.

The declaration comes as Pivotal steps up its efforts to establish itself among EMCs other leading brands. A combination of staff and products from EMC and VMware, Pivotal recently picked up steam when it announced a $105m investment from General Electric (GE).

Maritz said that the influx of capitol was a vote of confidence in Pivotal’s big data analysis muscle and an indication of how the company can change business. In GE’s case, the change will include a shift from the sales of hardware directly to firms into a service model in which GE will sell time on hardware it monitors and maintains in-house.

“They see their industrial business undergoing rapid change in the future,” said Maritz.

“They see the opportunity to transform the value of a jet engine or turbine by taking in all of the telemetry and delivering new value to their customers.”