Big business involves large-scale corporate-controlled financial or business activities. As a term, it describes activities that run from "huge transactions" to the more general "doing big things". In corporate jargon, the concept is commonly known as enterprise, or activities involving enterprise customers.
The concept first rose in a symbolic sense after 1880 in connection with the combination movement that began in American business at that time. Some examples of American corporations that fall into the category of "big business" as of 2015 are ExxonMobil, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, Apple, General Electric, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs; in the United States, big businesses in general are sometimes collectively pejoratively called "corporate America". The largest German corporations as of 2012 included Daimler AG, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank. SAP is Germany's largest software company. Among the largest companies in the United Kingdom as of 2012 are HSBC, Barclays, WPP plc, and BP. The latter half of the 19th century saw more technological advances and corporate growth in additional sectors, such as petroleum, machinery, chemicals, and electrical equipment (see Second Industrial Revolution).
In the sphere of enterprise software, beyond the functional level, an enterprise edition would emphasize institutional concerns around software security, fault tolerance, geographic redundancy, disaster recovery, dispersed operational collaboration with administrative teams large enough to have internal sub-departments, and multilingual and localized functionality that spans the global marketplace. Procurement, validation and regulatory compliance of large systems at the enterprise scale often involves a multi-year planning cycle.