Since your third-party folks are not literally, specifically requesting either UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE, you might need to include a byte-order-mark (BOM, "\x{feff}", aka "zero-width-no-break space") as the first character of a message: 
perl -MEncode -le '$str="\x{0442}\x{0435}\x{0441}\x{0442}";
  $sms=unpack("H*",encode("UTF-16",$str)); print $sms'

#prints: feff0442043504410442

[download]
(Note how the Encode module puts the BOM in for you automatically when you tell it to create "UTF-16" data, as opposed to "UTF-16[LB]E", which will not get an automatic BOM included.)

You just need to make sure about what is really being requested -- if the BOM screws things up, and almut's guess about it being big-endian turns out to be wrong, then it must be little-endian ("UTF-16LE").

It can be remarkably easy for this to be a matter of confusion -- many folks are not accustomed to being as specific as they should be when describing their unicode needs, and some tools for viewing wide-character byte sequences may give you a distorted view.

In reply to Re: UTF8 to UTF16, but... by graff
in thread UTF8 to UTF16, but... by natol44

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