Today at our Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington D.C., partners are showing their commitment to the cloud, with several companies making announcements about the solutions they've built on the Windows Azure platform.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Bedin Shop Systems, a provider of POS and In-Store Management systems designed for the cloud, announced version 2.0 of aKite, its cloud-based software services suite built for retail stores on the Windows Azure platform. The solution provides capabilities that enhance the connection between retailers and their customers and retailers and suppliers, while improving internal collaboration.

• GCommerce, provider of a B2B solution for the automotive industry, announced growing market momentum for its Virtual Inventory Cloud (VIC) solution, citing leading members of the auto parts industry as early adopters. Built on the Windows Azure platform, VIC enables hundreds of commercial wholesalers and retailers to improve margins and increase customer loyalty through better visibility into parts availability from suppliers.

• GXS, a provider of business-to business (B2B) e-commerce solutions, announced it has been testing GXS Trading Partner Analytics Beta, a new service built on Windows Azure as an on-demand extension to its GXS Trading Grid. The solution is expected to give customers greater insight into supply chain performance and the information flows of their B2B communities.

• Siemens PLM Software, a global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, announced a joint project with Microsoft to create the PLM industry's first cloud computing-based quality management solution. The solution will utilize the Windows Azure platform to securely run Siemens PLM Software's Dimensional Planning and Validation (DPV) application, showing how cloud computing can enable a world-class quality management application to be cost effectively accessed and leveraged on an as-needed basis.

• SugarCRM, a leading global provider of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced that Sugar 6 is now certified for deployment on the Windows Azure platform.

With more than 14,000 attendees at WPC, there are sure to be many more announcements to come; if you want to stay on top of news as it happens, be sure to check out the WPC virtual pressroom and tune into WPC to catch replays of keynotes and other sessions.

Read the full releases on our partners' websites: Bedin Shop Systems, GCommerce, GSX, Siemens and SugarCRM.