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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. [1] [2] [3]
The concept first rose in a symbolic sense after 1880 in connection with the combination movement that began in American business at that time.[ citation needed ] Some examples of American corporations that fall into the category of "big business" as of 2015 [update] 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". [4] The largest German corporations as of 2012 [update] included Daimler AG, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank. [5] SAP is Germany's largest software company. Among the largest companies in the United Kingdom as of 2012 [update] are HSBC, Barclays, WPP plc, and BP. [6] The latter half of the 19th century saw more technological advances and corporate growth in additional[ clarification needed ] 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.
The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first use of the term, in 1905, to be in "The City: The Hope of Democracy", Frederic C. Howe. [7]
The automotive industry began modestly in the late-19th century, but grew rapidly following the development of large-scale gasoline production in the early 20th century.
The relatively stable period of rebuilding after World War II led to new technologies (some of which were spin-offs from the war years) and new businesses.
The new technology of computers spread worldwide in the post war years.[ citation needed ] Businesses built around computer technology include: IBM, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Samsung, and Intel.
Miniaturization and integrated circuits, together with an expansion of radio and television technologies, provided fertile ground for business development. Electronics businesses include JVC, Sony (Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita), and Texas Instruments (Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Chodery), while also the companies in the computer-section above can be considered electronics.
Nuclear power was added to fossil fuel as the main sources of energy.
The social consequences of the concentration of economic power in the hands of those persons controlling "big business" has been a constant concern both of economists and of politicians since the end of the 19th century. Various attempts have been made to investigate the effects of "bigness" upon labor, consumers, and investors, as well as upon prices and competition. "Big business" has been accused of a wide variety of misdeeds that range from the exploitation of the working class to the corruption of politicians [4] and the fomenting of war. Attitudes toward big business have fluctuated; Americans generally had a favorable view of big business in the 1950s, which would worsen drastically in a generation later. [8]
Corporate concentration can lead to influence over government in areas such as tax policy, trade policy, environmental policy, foreign policy, and labor policy through lobbying. In 2005, the majority of Americans believed that big business has "too much power in Washington." [9]
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became highly influential in the rise of personal computers through software like Windows, and the company has since expanded to Internet services, cloud computing, video gaming and other fields. Microsoft is the largest software maker, one of the most valuable public U.S. companies, and one of the most valuable brands globally.
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world in 2020 by revenue and market capitalization. The company's 2023 ranking in the Forbes Global 2000 was 80.
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Novell technology contributed to the emergence of local area networks, which displaced the dominant mainframe computing model and changed computing worldwide.
CA Technologies, Inc., formerly Computer Associates International, Inc., and CA, Inc., was an American multinational enterprise software developer and publisher that existed from 1976 to 2018. CA grew to rank as one of the largest independent software corporations in the world, and at one point was the second largest. The company created systems software that ran in IBM mainframe, distributed computing, virtual machine, and cloud computing environments.
Dell EMC is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and Round Rock, Texas, and is a subsidiary of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products and services that enable organizations to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. Dell EMC's target markets include large companies and small- and medium-sized businesses across various vertical markets.
Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University, who wrote extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has been called "the doyen of American business historians".
Charles E. Phillips is an American business executive in the tech industry. He is the co-founder of Recognize, a focused investment firm. From 2010 to 2019, he was the CEO of Infor, a company that specializes in enterprise software applications for specific industries.
World Wide Technology, Inc. (WWT) is a privately-held American technology services company based in St. Louis, Missouri. The company has an annual revenue of $20 billion and employs over 10,000 people. WWT works in the areas of cloud computing, computer security, data centers, data analytics and artificial intelligence, computer networks, application software development, cell phone carrier networking, and consulting services.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a multinational corporation specializing in computer technology and information technology consulting. Headquartered in Armonk, New York, the company originated from the amalgamation of various enterprises dedicated to automating routine business transactions, notably pioneering punched card-based data tabulating machines and time clocks. In 1911, these entities were unified under the umbrella of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR).
Software asset management (SAM) is a business practice that involves managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization, and disposal of software applications within an organization. According to ITIL, SAM is defined as “…all of the infrastructure and processes necessary for the effective management, control, and protection of the software assets…throughout all stages of their lifecycle.” Fundamentally intended to be part of an organization's information technology business strategy, the goals of SAM are to reduce information technology (IT) costs and limit business and legal risk related to the ownership and use of software, while maximizing IT responsiveness and end-user productivity. SAM is particularly important for large corporations regarding redistribution of licenses and managing legal risks associated with software ownership and expiration. SAM technologies track license expiration, thus allowing the company to function ethically and within software compliance regulations. This can be important for both eliminating legal costs associated with license agreement violations and as part of a company's reputation management strategy. Both are important forms of risk management and are critical for large corporations' long-term business strategies.
TIBCO Software Inc. is a business unit of Cloud Software Group that provides enterprise software. It has headquarters in Palo Alto and offices in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.
Aldon is a business unit of Rocket Software. It develops, manufactures, licenses and supports software change management products for the enterprise application lifecycle management (ALM) and software change management (SCM) markets.
SoftServe, Inc., founded in 1993 in Lviv, Ukraine, is a technology company specializing in consultancy services and software development. SoftServe provides services in the fields of big data, Internet of things, cloud computing, DevOps, e-commerce, computer security, experience design, and health care. With its United States headquarters in Austin, Texas and European headquarters in Lviv, Ukraine, the company employs more than 12,000 people in 58 offices in 14 countries. It is one of the largest employers for software developers in Eastern Europe, and the largest outsourcing and outstaffing IT company in Ukraine.
NIIT Limited (National Institute of Information Technology) is an Indian multinational skills and talent development corporation headquartered in Gurgaon, India. The company was set up in 1981 to help the nascent IT industry overcome its human resource challenges. NIIT offers training and development to individuals, enterprises and institutions.
1C Company is a Russian software developer, distributor and publisher based in Moscow. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, related services and video games.
ServiceNow, Inc. is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. Founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, ServiceNow is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Russell 1000 Index and S&P 500 Index. In 2018, Forbes magazine named it number one on its list of the world's most innovative companies.
International Business Machines Corporation, nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
Actian is an American software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California that provides analytics-related software, products, and services. The company sells database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and data integration solutions.
BlueTalon, Inc. was a private enterprise software company, that provided data-centric security, user access control, data masking, and auditing solutions for complex, hybrid data environments. BlueTalon was founded in 2013 by Pratik Verma and is headquartered in Redwood City, California.
Jamf Holding Corp. is a software company best known for developing Jamf Pro, a mobile device management system.
For instance, candidates in the 2016 presidential primaries for both political parties took positions relating themselves either with or against corporate America, with neither party appearing to have a monopoly on appearing for or against "Wall Street," "big banks,: and other subsets of private firms. [...] Big business or corporate America can often be pejorative terms associated with greed, lack of accountability, and corruption.
We are beginning to realize that the same self-interest is the politics of big business.