The latest Gartner research shows that businesses spend $120 billion worldwide on enterprise application software this year.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) represented the largest source of investment at $24.9 billion, the total spend was a rise 4.5 percent on 2011.

Tom Eid, research vice-president at Gartner, predicted that: "Spending in 2012 is anticipated to focus on industry-specific applications; upgrades to established, mission-critical software; integrating and securing established systems and infrastructure”, and that businesses were looking at cost-effective software as a way to counter economic downturns.