With Web Services and the IETF, standards are finally becoming consistent with the desired level of internationalization for distributed computing. But most implementations do a poor job of providing intuitive solutions for heterogeneous multinational interconnectivity. Current research and the directions being taken by international and industry standards bodies are addressing the problems of global systems.

Unicode is a potential solution for most of the current problems in global distributed systems development and management. Many common distributed applications can benefit from Unicode now. There are several methods for implementing robust global distributed systems using Unicode within the framework of existing standards for distributed computing.

New, Unicode-enabled technologies will be discussed as to their role in helping legacy enterprises solve their global issues. Web Services, specifically Java and XML will be looked at from a systems-level view for portability and universal data transmission. The Internet and the WWW will be inspected briefly, with respect to Unicode, as to their role in globalizing user interfaces and increasing application and data accessibility.