According to Acer, the companies have agreed to a selling price of $320 million. In addition, iGware can earn $75 million if it hits certain performance-based milestones. With iGware’s technology, Acer says that it will deliver a new service, called Acer Cloud, “to serve and benefit Acer customers, and enhance brand value.”

iGware has largely been under the radar in the cloud space, but the company has achieved some success. According to Acer, iGware’s cloud software and infrastructure tools are available on over 100 million devices around the world. The company’s most notable customer is Nintendo, which it partners with to power online services for the hardware maker’s
Wii, DS, and 3DS. Acer says that iGware has also inked a deal with Nintendo that will see it support the company’s Wii U.

Acer’s acquisition of IGware for almost $400 million is a bit of a shocker. IGware is an unknown player in cloud computing. In fact, to be more honest, they aren’t a player in cloud computing according to any information I can find online. This is the first time I’ve seen a company with a single-page html site sell for more than $300 million.

News on IGware is very thin. They apparently (I’m making an educated guess) provide remote management, monitoring, patching services for big companies with deployments of set top boxes. That’s harder than you’d think when you are doing it for 100 million or more end devices. (Trend Micro’s ambient cloud, the Smart Protection Network, handles about 105 million endpoints and growing.)

But here’s the kicker – being a command and control center for a giant ambient cloud doesn’t take a lot of data center space or even servers. That means that services like IGware’s are actually higher margin than a typical IaaS cloud provider, simply based on efficiency.

Even so, the odds are that Acer overpaid for this deal, simply based on the fact that their spokesperson, when quoted, didn’t know employee count, revenues, or much else about IGware. Based on my Corporate Development experience at Blue Coat and Citrix, this is a potential sign that the deal was pushed through quickly without a normal strategic acquisition decision making process that should (based on being a spokesperson for 3 public companies) include briefing your spokespeople before announcing a large deal.

But hey, I’ll take it. This is an early example of an ambient cloud management company being taken out for a significant amount of money. I predict there will be more deals like this as the rare companies who can manage distributed devices on a very large scale become recognized for the highly leveraged clouds they manage.

If Acer can pull off a cloud strategy (not an easy task for any hardware manufacturing company) this could be a transformative deal for them.