The new releases "are all around helping customers progress in their big data challenges," said Nancy Kopp, IBM's chief of big data strategy and marketing. "We want to help customers use all data types."

While companies such as Cloudera and Hortonworks may tout their enterprise Apache Hadoop distributions, IBM has taken a broader approach to big data analysis. Large organizations will want to consolidate their multiple tiers of data management into a single architecture, so the data can be shared across systems.

"There is definitely a play for a Hadoop system to make very large data sets," said Phil Francisco, IBM vice president of big data product management. But he noted that organizations will also want to make decisions on streaming data before it is stored on disk. And organizations still use their data warehouses to provide detailed analysis.

"The key is to have these [approaches] coordinated with one another, with information integration and information governance," Francisco said.

The new products and services IBM announced Monday help in this regard, Kopp said.