This is John Richards writing to you from the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

We have kicked off the conference with some really exciting news. During his keynote address this morning, Ray Ozzie announced the Azure Services Platform. The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The foundational layer is Windows(TM) Azure, for storage and computing resources. The building block services that sit atop of this foundational layer are Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Services, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services, and Microsoft Sharepoint Services.

Live Services are marquee building block services within the Azure Services Platform for handling user data and application resources. We’ll have a few more exciting announcements today, and we will talk more at length about Live Services here tomorrow.

So, watch this space for more info and check out the new Azure Services Platform.