For its real-time data analysis software, IBM has a set of pre-built report templates, called accelerators, that could help telecommunications firms more easily recognize common issues, such as fraud and customer churn.

Sprint is already using these report templates to monitor network events, outages and client use. Sprint "wants to analyze this stuff when it is happening," Kopp said.

IBM's in-house Hadoop distribution, called IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, has been augmented with new capabilities as well. IBM has generated new report templates, ones that can conduct sentiment analysis on data from social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter.

"The more accelerators we can build on top of our existing capabilities, the faster we can move our customers out of planning and into projects," Kopp said.

BigInsights now includes the federated search capability from the Vivisimo search engine, which IBM in April. Using the Vivisimo interface, now called InfoSphere Data Explorer, users can execute a single search across multiple data repositories, including both structured and unstructured data.