Right down the street from MIT is a 25-year-old technology company which offers up a very big promise on its web home page.

"With its patented Build for Change technology, Pegasystems delivers fast and immediate business benefits including improved revenue growth of 30% and more, cost reductions of 40% and more thanks to work automation, and 5 points increase in customer retention."

In these days of an uncertain economy, $4 a gallon gas and housing prices that can't seem to find a bottom, I thought it might be a good time to go visit Pegasystems and it is "still enthusiastic after all these years" CEO Alan Trefler.

I've been reporting on the Boston tech scene for a long time and I've met Trefler a few times. I know the chess whiz story (19-year-old Brookline whiz ties for first in 1975 World Open chess championship) and I am well aware that the number of successful 25-year old Massachusetts tech companies is a very narrow club. Progress Software was founded in 1981, Raytheon has been around forever and Jacob Wirth's bar on Stuart Street in Boston has been inspiring poets and business startups since 1868.

But I wasn't interested in one more chess champion story or a "we're still here" story. In March the company reported 2007 revenues of $162 million and profits of $6.6 million. Especially in ominous economic times, getting a company to reveal its profit secrets always makes a tempting story.

Sorry, there isn't any real big secret about how Pegasystems works. The secret, if there is one, is consistency. They work with big companies at making company processes more efficient. Despite the talk of social networks and new company paradigms, most companies still have processes that are often undefined, are a mix of people and computers and are run a certain way because that is the way they have always operated.

Pegasystems offers what Trefler describes as a "bonafide business advantage" by automating processes that are inefficient and often require a lot of manual involvement. If there is a secret sauce, it has been taking this concept and working it over sufficiently to keep the final business result as the target and not get hung up in programming languages, flowcharts and the long march from concept to implementation. For example when the state of Masschusetts approved a mandatory health insurance program, one of PegaSystems largest customers - BlueCross and BlueShield of Massachusetts - was able to build an online enrollment system in six weeks.

The other half of the secret sauce is keeping the big companies sufficiently happy to keep renewing their licenses with Pegasystems. The license model assures a consistent revenue stream that can smooth out economic roadbumps. That seems to be what is happening now.

The big change that Trefler sees are company executives moving away from an obsession with data to an "intenet oriented environment" which is more end result and process driven than simply building big data stores and then trying to figure out what is in the warehouse.

One thing about real companies are that they do what say they will and they do it year after year. I expect the Pegasystems business could fall off once all companies have created highly efficient internal processes within their firms. That is a long, long ways off.