BTW. The Star Team SDK is Java Oriented, not much use to a Perl programmer

Java and Perl are not mutually exclusive. Quoting from the first match from googling star-team sdk:

The StarTeam SDK was originally written in Java. A COM wrapper provides support for languages such as Visual Basic, C++, ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, Delphi and others. Developers should select the language that they are most comfortable developing in.

So I'd think that posting to a Perl site regarding it was likely because someone was "most comfortable developing in" Perl, which is certainly capable of using a COM interface.

And even if they somehow managed to produce a StarTeam SDK that prevented you from using anything but Java with it, it would still be useful for managing the source code for Perl projects.

We put our Perl projects into StarTeam, but we don't use the StarTeam SDK, just the usual GUI client and some of standard CLI clients (often launched from Perl scripts). The original question was too broad/vague for me to offer any response to it, however.