Bina Rebrands Offerings, Adds Bina Desktop to Lineup

By Allison Proffitt 

 

March 25, 2014 | Bina Technologies announced the details of their new desktop offering this morning, along with a rebranding of their products. 

 

Last month, Bina’s CEO, Narges Bani Asadi, mentioned a “Bina Lite” product to Bio-IT World. The same genomic analysis as the Bina Box provided would now be available on the desktop. Today the slimmed down version is officially available as Bina Desktop and Bina’s flagship product, Bina Box, will be rebranded Bina Enterprise. All of the Bina appliances as a family will now be called Bina Boxes.

 

The impetus for Bina Desktop came from changes happening in the market, said Asadi. “There’s a growing number of smaller labs or individual researchers who want to have access to the offerings that we’re building. They really like the features that are in the product, the quality of the data, the speed. But they do not necessarily have a data center or they do not want to go through all the trouble of adding resources to the cluster that they have. They just want an easy way to get started using the product. 

 

“One thing that happened in parallel is that we found that the inefficiencies that exist in some of the institutions because of the dependency of the scientists and researchers on the IT organization,” she said. “They need computers and they need IT people, but really what they care about at the end of the day is their science.”

 

Asadi said the Bina team developed Bina Desktop to address that problem. Calling the solution a “mini supercomputer in a desktop,” Asadi said the solution is the fastest available for RNA-seq analysis, requires no IT support, and the pricing is so competitive that it is, “way cheaper than if they want to do it themselves.” 

 

Bina desktop is small enough to fit under a scientists’ desk, performs the same complex whole genome, whole exome, targeted gene panels, and RNASeq analyses as Bina Enterprise. The software is the same, explained Gianfranco de Feo, Bina’s VP of Marketing. The hardware is smaller, and with fewer compute nodes throughput is lower. 

 

The user interface is also the same and features drop down menus. “Select what you want and go,” de Feo said. “You don’t need to be a bioinformatics expert to run and analyze and visualize and look at the quality control metrics and things like that.” 

 

de Feo said the ease of use is a particular selling point to smaller labs. “The ability to interact with the same software that the big boys are using is really making a significant impact in the work they’re doing in their own labs, because right now they’re waiting months for their computer centers or they’re just not doing the studies because they don’t have the capabilities to analyze the data in the way that we would be able to give them.” 

 

Editor’s Note: Narges Bani Asadi will be presenting at the 2014 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, May 1, in Boston.