To strengthen technological capabilities to pursue new business opportunities, online shopping portal Infibeam Inc Ltd plans to set up tier-III cloud data centre at Gandhinagar.

"We believe that a Rs. 350-crore tier-III data centre at GIFT city, Gandhinagar will enable increased efficiency and adaptability in our search processes, ensure faster and more user-friendly user interfaces and deliver effective, customized, personalised and more relevant search results for our customers," MD of Infibeam Inc Vishal Mehta said in Mumbai.

"We believe centre would provide us with certain strategic and other advantages including such as underlying control over hardware, increased availability and mitigation of geo-specific risk," he said in a statement.

Further, it will enable us to exercise increased control over proprietary technology and customer information, better manage customer and market analytics, ensure superior confidentiality and security protection and also provide disaster recovery support infrastructure, Mehta said.

It will also help Infibeam improve operational efficiencies and non-redundant and multiple distribution path and fully compatible topology of site architecture with high standards of reliability and availability, he added.

The centre would offer increased efficiency and adaptability in search process ensuring faster and user-friendly interface and deliver effective, customised, personalised and more relevant search results for customers and merchants.

"We evaluated all options but GIFT City is best suited to help scale up infrastructure. Data centre is a key component and the heavy capex in it will help us provide strong, robust and secure infrastructure to merchants. Along with the cloud based infrastructure, it also helps in data analytics and securitisation. There is growth emerging out of data residing in the centre," Mehta added.

To consolidate operations in Ahmedabad, the company propose to purchase property for shifting and setting up of registered office and corporate office at Gift City.

Infibeam Inc will hit the capital markets on March 21 to mop-up Rs 450 crore through an initial share plan, becoming the first e-commerce firm to tap the IPO route. The company has fixed the price band at Rs. 360-432 per equity share for the IPO.

Infibeam competes with Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal and others in the e-commerce platforms.