In Brief The Competition and Markets Authority, the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog, has opened an investigation into whether IBM’s planned acquisition of cloud software vendor HashiCorp would affect competition.The CMA said Monday it was inviting comment on the merger from interested parties by January 16. The regulator set a provisional February 25 deadline to decide whether to clear the deal or refer it for further review. As The Wall Street Journal reports, IBM announced it agreed to buy HashiCorp in April f ...