In SYS-CON's annual round-up of technology predictions earlier this year, Brad Abrams (pictured), a highly respected Group Program Manager at Microsoft, highlighted the likelihood of what he called "the UX meme of the consumer facing world [leaking] into the enterprise."

The importance of user experience will reach the enterprise at last, Abrams reckoned, in 2008. He is a distinguished Speaker Faculty member of the AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo coming up in San Jose, CA, October 20-22, 2008.

Abrams was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime, and .NET Framework teams at Microsoft where he is currently the Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team which is responsible for delivering the developer platform that spans both clients and web based applications as well as the common services that are available to all applications

"The days of the battleship gray forms of data application as the king of the enterprise are numbered because of an imperative towards richer visualization of complex and interconnected data," Abrams noted. "While there will always be a need for the traditional sort of application, by the end of 2008, it is no longer the only element of the corporate landscape," he added.

Abrams's predictions came in the SYS-CON.com feature "Where's AJAX, SOA and Virtualization Headed in 2008?" - which also included predictions from: Tim Bray, Sun; Joshua Allen, Microsoft; Dr Adam Kolawa, Parasoft; Eric Newcomer, IONA Technologies; Bill Roth, BEA Systems; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; and Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.

Read Brad Abrams' 2008 predictions in full here.