I work for the BBC on a team that's very close to the team which developed "Perl on Rails". There's been a bit of unnecessary hype about this. The problem with Siemens, specifically, is that they've been told by us to be very cautious about what they allow since "security" is so important. Siemans got a bit overzealous in interpreting that and the BBC was a bit slow to respond.

The primary benefit of "Perl on Rails" has been the internal momentum to ensure this doesn't happen again. You can read a bit more about this at an O'Reilly blog post I made about the Perl on Rails mess.