IBM has built a new version of its InfoSphere Big Insights for its smart cloud infrastructure that uses Hadoop as its base to analyze structured and unstructured data.

It’s significant in that it does put IBM a step closer to competing in the cloud with Amazon Web Services and demonstrates how Hadoop is becoming a core base for big data analytics in the enterprise and with Web oriented companies.

The new service from IBM uses a Hadoop cluster on the IBM Smart Cloud that the client or IBM can set up. The service uses Hadoop for the distributed storage and then a layer such as HBase to query the data. Once set up, IBM claims an employee can start using it less than 30 minutes to do analysis on Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds and structured information such as regional sales information.

The news came today at the IBM Information on Demand (IOD) event in Las Vegas that featured a host of announcements from IBM such as a new native iPad app for Cognos and a new mapping feature.

As with most IBM events, there is far too much for us to cover at the IBM Information on Demand conference. But the Hadoop news is a noteworthy start, considering the attention the distributed file system and analytics technology is now receiving.

It puts IBM in a different context, especially considering the competition it faces in the market. Oracle, Dell, EMC and HP all have Hadoop offerings. But only a few have a cloud-bases offering. AWS and Appistry are about the two closest competitors.

Appistry is a startup that this summer received a $12 million series D round of funding. The company’s profile is relatively low-key. Its primary focus is on the life sciences sector.

Forrester Senior Analyst James Kobelius said in an interview after the press conference that AWS has a fair number of customers using its infrastructure to build Hadoop stacks. Its emphasis is on providing an infrastructure for developers to create Hadoop environments. Customers include Etsy, Foursquare and Yelp. AWS is also providing solutions geared more to the enterprise customer. But its hooks are in the developer community.

IBM is using Hadoop and its Big Insights technology to provide a discovery engine for customers. It is less an infrastructure play than a software as a service with Hadoop on the back end.

Overall, IBM now has a software and a limited cloud offering. Other than integration with Netezza, IBM doesn’t yet have a Hadoop appliance.

But online the story is a bit different. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is about IBM’s only competitor in offering Hadoop.