Almost every “is” statement on the “IBM Blockchain – What is Blockchain?” page is a “might” or “could” – no blockchain does all the things it describes in present-day terms, and certainly not Hyperledger, the basis of IBM Blockchain.
Hyperledger.org is a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM has long favoured: the illusion of an open project, with no “there” there. I spent half an hour dredging the site and could not find one clear statement of what this software is actually intended to do, let alone differences from and similarities to existing blockchains. Even Bitcoin blog CoinDesk notes: “Among the doubts facing Hyperledger is a perceived lack of clarity on what might be ultimately produced by the initiative.”
If you click long enough, you'll find a page where the participating companies have dumped their unfinished blockchain experiments. The main code contributor is Digital Asset Holdings; their joining announcement (on their own site, not hyperledger.org) gives as technical details only that Hyperledger is an append-only ledger and has an actual Bitcoin-style blockchain in it. (Digital Asset Holdings was founded by Blythe Masters, pioneer of the credit default swap, the financial instrument behind the credit crunch of 2008 that may have provoked Nakamoto to finally release Bitcoin.)
As IBM were actually surprised to find out, all manner of businesses – financial institutions, beef industry, shoe brands, confectioners – don’t want to share data even with all participants in their blockchain, but only with the people the specific deal is actually with. Funnily enough. This was apparently news to them. It turns out that IBM set up an elaborate hammer design consortium without first finding out if there are nails.