“Build for change.” What an unusual slogan for an enterprise software company.

Isn’t it the goal of every profitable enterprise software business to build a standardized application and try to sell it as many times and with as little customization as possible? Not at Pegasystems (Nasdaq: PEGA).

At PEGA, the current industry leader in Business Process Management solutions (BPM), change or adaptability is at the core of the company’s software development philosophy. It is not something to be avoided. It is not something to be ignored. It is an opportunity to provide solutions that truly meet clients’ ever-evolving business needs.

Since Alan Trefler founded PEGA in 1983, he has managed to engineer consistent and impressive growth. In the last five years the company has generated 250% growth, reaching $250 million in revenue in 2010 from around 100 million in 2005.

On the surface it seems PEGA may simply be another young software company that took an early lead in the right emerging segment. But a few weeks ago, we interviewed Alan, the CEO and founder of Pegasystems, and believe there is something special going on.

As a former competitive chess player, Alan brought an unorthodox view to the software industry. He realized there was an opportunity to innovate in the enterprise software sector through a dynamic software product that would be flexible and customizable to better adapt to clients’ changing business needs. He wanted to empower business people by allowing them to “own the change,” at least on the technology side.

As Alan put it, “If you don’t believe in the rhythm of change, if the rhythm of change is measured in years or quarters because you know that from writing a [technology request] document to the delivery of the result it’s going to take a year, then you become obsessed with putting everything into [that document]…[but] if you believe you can really iterate every week…then your whole view changes. This is an approach that enables continuous improvement.”