International Gaming Technology (IGT) Customer Case Study

The IGT Gaming division encompasses product and systems development, MegaJackpots wide area progressives, proprietary gaming products, sales, and casino services. They use XBinder with their AVP (Advanced Video Platform) software. This software is a platform for EGMs (Electronic Gaming Machines). There are about 536,000 lines of XBinder-generated source code within IGT's AVP software.

One of the software's functions is protocol support for the system that runs on the machine. The protocol involved is called G2S (Game to System). Information on G2S is available on the Gaming Standards Association web site. G2S has multiple namespaces, which IGT's previous rudimentary system could not easily handle. So when they decided to start supporting G2S, they chose XBinder.

Another reason IGT chose XBinder was because of its strong Unix capabilities and its platform flexibility. Objective Systems sells its runtime source code, and this practice allowed IGT to build the XBinder runtime on their QNX platform.

With the system that was in use before IGT started using XBinder, a change in the G2S schema would have required static data entry, whereas with XBinder all that is required is a re-generation of the code using the XBinder compiler. Consequently, depending on the complexity of the schema change, XBinder is giving IGT anywhere from a two-fold to a twenty-fold decrease in the amount of time needed to adopt a G2S schema change.

IGT is also impressed with the quality of the support that they receive from Objective Systems. IGT software engineer William Salivar notes that "Part of the reason we're staying with Objective Systems is the outstanding support we get from them."