Perl is supported by Sun Microsystems Inc. Other posters here have mentioned that Perl ships with Solaris 2.8 and 2.9. In addition you could ask your manager to use a web browser thingy to follow this link to sunfreeware.com "Created and Sponsored by Sun Microsystems" for an update to Perl 5.6.1 for Solaris. Or perhaps your manager might like to follow recent discussions of Perl development for Solaris 9 held by Alan Burlison a Sun employee on the perl development list. Do note that on Solaris you can build Perl (and XS extensions) either using gcc or the Sun licensed Forte compiler. For better performance on SPARC try to build and install perl using the Forte compiler.