Financial institutions across the country are deploying increasingly diverse technology platforms - both open and proprietary. While the government does not want to tell them what software to use, it wants to ensure that there's no chaos.

Imagine one bank making all its documents and spreadsheets in MS Office, and then exchanging information with a bank running Linux. It’s a recipe for disaster since many documents created by one kind of software may not be accessed correctly in another. The country's booming financial sector could get entangled in a web of incompatible formats.

Samir Kochar, CEO, Kochar Consultancy Services said, “There is one lobby which is going with the Sun slash IBM slash, you know, Linux kind of oriented documentation standards. The other clearly is the majority user of Microsoft office kind of standards. You know who between these two will change the lay of the land pretty substantially in terms of which software will sell and which will not.”

Adoption of open source software platforms like Linux is on the rise despite the government's refusal to officially endorse the technology as other emerging markets have done. However, the government wants to make clear in its national E-governance policy that "no compulsory open source" does not mean "no unified document standards."

Said R Chandrashekhar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Communication & IT, “What the government does is to lay down the standards so that even with various heterogeneous platforms, it would be possible for different applications to be integrated and communicate with each other.”

The applications that are most used of course are those from Microsoft which is taking no chances. It signed a deal last week with Linux distributor Xandros to among other things, ensure compatibility between MS office and Xandros Linux documents.