Akonix Debuts Enterprise Class Development Platform for Presence and Real-Time Communications Applications and Bots; Akonix L7 Builder(TM) v5 Designed to Help Customers Develop and Deploy Distributed IM Applications.

SAN DIEGO -- Akonix Systems, Inc., the premier provider of instant messaging (IM) management and security solutions, has announced the availability of Akonix L7 Builder v5, an enhanced system for integrating presence and IM into enterprise applications in order to improve productivity and create robust real-time communications applications.

Organizations are increasingly using IM for business critical communications and recognizing opportunities to leverage presence and access enterprise data via IM. Akonix L7 Builder v5 provides developers and system integrators innovative technology to create and deploy comprehensive solutions to extend existing enterprise applications while supporting standard development environments and the use of the leading public and enterprise IM networks. Akonix L7 Builder customers are leveraging the public IM networks as a new marketing and customer service channel. Companies are creating closed-loop decision support systems based on presence-awareness and the use of IM on wired and wireless devices.

"As a provider of telecommunications services to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, we were looking for a way to extend our existing i711.com IP relay service to instant messaging users. L7 Builder's rich set of APIs and support for industry standards gave us the tools we needed to extend our existing IP relay service and infrastructure to AIM," said Jesse Odom, CTO at GoAmerica. "Through AIM, our customers can now carry on a live dialog with a hearing person, with a relay operator receiving the contents of the deaf user's IM, and speaking it to the hearing person on a standard phone call."

Akonix L7 Builder v5 features and functionality include:

--Support for the new MSN Messenger Activity Window, enabling a developer to create and deploy bots on the MSN network that include rich interactive graphic content

--Compliance with the MSN Bot Platform Certification criteria, enabling individual developers to get bots certified and onto a provisioned account

--Providing IM application developers the choice to work with a Java, .NET (C#), COM or VXML software developers kit (SDK). Each SDK contains a complete set of APIs to extend existing applications and create new ones

--A bot API with IM session management and support for multi-participant IM sessions. This enables the creation of application solutions that involve one or more IM users simultaneously conversing with a bot or a single user interacting with a bot that is made up of multiple applications

--A Presence API to detect and leverage the presence status of IM users within existing workflow and decision support applications

--An IM markup language based on HTML, which allows users to define the text message formats sent out by an IM application without needing to know the text-formatting nuances of each IM network

--The separation of the application logic from its IM identity, enabling developers to create IM applications that can be immediately deployed on the leading IM networks

"Organizations are using real-time communications as a way to enhance productivity and they are beginning to see the need to extend the value of presence and instant messaging within their organizations," said Don Montgomery, vice president of marketing at Akonix. "With version 5 of Akonix L7 Builder, we are giving companies and individual developers the tools they need to move beyond the traditional use of IM and develop, integrate and deploy a variety of applications."

Additional Akonix L7 Builder customers have said the following:

Mike McCoy, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Accredited Home Lenders, said, "Akonix L7 Builder extended our Web Broker Portal with secure real-time messaging and presence awareness for both the brokers and loan teams working with the brokers. Using the Web IM client we created with L7 Builder, a registered broker can work with loan specialists in real-time to resolve issues with loan applications and get updated on the status of applications."

Twan Claassen, technical director at Ecreation, said, "We used L7 Builder to deploy our first bot in December for a broadcast station called Radio 538, the most listened to radio station in the Netherlands. The product allowed us to make a virtual DJ that takes music requests, delivers the station's playlists and music charts, and provides other useful information to the station's listeners through IM. To deploy the bot, we used L7 Builder to extend the functionality of an existing Web-based DJ application that we already had in place. Since deploying the bot, demand for the Radio 538 virtual DJ has grown to over 20,000 interactions per day from over 250,000 individuals."

For more information on how to leverage presence and IM throughout an organization, visit Akonix at Microsoft TechEd 2006 in Boston, June 11-15, or contact Akonix at [e-mail] or visit www.akonix.com.

About Akonix

Akonix is the most deployed IM security product in the world, enabling Global 1000 companies to deploy productive, enterprise-wide IM that is secure, compliant and managed.

Over one million global users across hundreds of organizations in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Energy, Technology, Healthcare and Entertainment industries use Akonix solutions. With more than 20 patent applications, Akonix's award-winning products provide the industry's only automatically-updated protection to block viruses and malware for both enterprise and public IM systems. Akonix has certified partnerships with all leading IM and presence providers including America Online(R), Microsoft, Yahoo!, Reuters, IBM, Parlano, Antepo and Bloomberg.

An IM industry first, the Akonix Security Center (www.imsecuritycenter.com) provides real-time information about worms, viruses and other vulnerabilities that target IM and P2P networks. The company issues monthly and quarterly IM threat watch reports to track key trends and vulnerabilities.

For further information on the company, please visit www.akonix.com.

About Accredited

Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co. is a mortgage company operating throughout the U.S. and in Canada. Accredited originates, finances, securitizes, services, and sells non-prime mortgage loans secured by residential real estate. Founded in 1990, the company is headquartered in San Diego. Additional information may be found at http://investors.accredhome.com.