Akonix, the instant messaging management vendor, today announced the acquisition of Natural Messaging, a company focused on developing conversational interaction (a la 'bot and voice technologies) with applications.

This certainly strengthens Akonix' architecture story in the area that its strongest competitors -- IMlogic and FaceTime -- are putting their efforts behind: application integration.

Akonix also has announced an application developer program, close on the heels of IMlogics similar announcement a few weeks ago at DEMO.