The increasing trust businesses place in outsourcing firms will help many of them feel confident enough to let their external partners administer key functions this year, it has been suggested.

According to the National Outsourcing Trade Association (Noa), many firms are already seeing the benefits of outsourcing and their positive experiences are persuading them to allow mission-critical operations, such as research and development, to be handled by outsourcing service providers

It predicts that this will lead to growth in the outsourcing sector in 2008, with Martyn Hart, chairman of the Noa, telling Computer World UK that global economic turmoil is also playing a role in the transition.

"The credit crunch will create a situation whereby outsourcing will offer a solution to business needs and the maximisation of outsourcing, through knowledge process outsourcing and innovation, will mean that the effect that outsourcing has on companies' bottom lines will grow," he explained.

Noa is not the first organisation to forecast an expansion of the outsourcing market this year, with a report published earlier this month by Gartner predicting the outsourcing market will grow by 8.1 per cent in 2008.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'.