Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for representing the characters required for different languages. Unicode changed all that. Now there is one encoding system: Unicode.
International e-business demands that IT systems be able to present content and conduct transactions in all major world languages. Anything less will hinder business development. Unicode is a fundamental building block for international e-business because:
- Allows data from many different languages to be stored in one repository
- Enables a single set of application source code to be written to process data in any language
- Makes the addition of new language support to an e-business application relatively simple since character processing and storage remains unchanged. This results in lower costs of implementation, faster speed to market, and better customer satisfaction.
Your company may not need to create e-business applications in 30 or 40 languages today. However, when you do need to expand from your local language to any other language, you can do so without having to extensively redesign your systems each time you add a new language. You re-engineer once to convert to Unicode and then it is easy to add new language support to meet the demands of your business.
The Unicode Standard was adopted by IBM and other several other companies including Apple, HP, JustSystem, Microsoft®, Oracle, SAP, Sun™, Sybase, and Unisys. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java™, ECMAScript (JavaScript™), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, and WML. Unicode is also the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646 and is supported in many operating systems and all modern browsers.
IBM made International Components for Unicode (ICU) available as free, open-source software to encourage the adoption of Unicode and standardize Unicode APIs across as many platforms as possible.
Unicode defines characters for the languages of the world, and provides detailed properties and algorithms for computer systems. The current release contains all the information needed to update software to support the latest characters | 
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