That is one name for it. For a while these services were going by 'BizTalk Services', or something like that. There were two that were up on the labs site, for the public to use, but they weren't publicized very well. We got to see the other services that are in the works at the MVP Conference a few weeks ago.
Enterprise Service Buses (or ESBs) are great things. They let us create services in our enterprise, and loosely couple our systems together, while doing it in a discoverable, manageable, governable, reliable fashion.
When you put this infrastructure in place, you can start tying in services from more than just your enterprise. While you will typically have home grown services, and a mix of services from your commercial off the shelf line of business applications, it gets real interesting when you start tying into services available on the Internet. Of course you have to do this in a way that is reliable and useful to your business. This become a huge new way to leverage SaaS stuff in your enterprise.
The Connected System division has now publicly announced some of these BizTalk services for you to use. They are now in their next version, and have been moved from labs.live.com to labs.BizTalk.net.
The services are now in the CTP stage, and while you can use them all you want, there aren't any SLA expectations (meaning you should not use them to route ambulances, etc.)
There are four services, and I think they will be much more useful than people think.
1. Identity Services - Federated identity in the cloud. This is based on CardSpace.
2. Connectivity Services - Take the technology that lets two people use MSN Messenger behind two different firewalls, and use it to connect up services and consumers. That's hot!
3. ServiceBus Services - Messaging pipes that has an eventing model, so other services in the cloud can handle those events. This is officially step 1 of building SkyNet.
4. Workflow Services - Fairly obvious, but now orchestrate in the cloud.
Check out the site, (register so you can create your first CardSpaces card) and the blog posts from the product team.
http://labs.BizTalk.net
John Shewchuk blogs about the why we are doing BizTalk Services - the world’s first Internet Service Bus.
Dennis Pilarinos blogs on how to get started with BizTalk Services.
Darrly Taft discusses BizTalk Services in eWeek.