Yes, MSDW is a massive Perl shop. I have interviewed there twice. Once for perm, then I turned it down. And secondly for a contract, and I turned that down. The second time I met CPAN author Brent Power (BPOWERS). He said that they were going to pay all of the 55K for Damian outright, but the Yet Another organization told them to back off.

They still have Damian scheduled to come there for 2 full weeks of lectures.

They also have their own internal "Perl monks"/comp.lang.perl.misc inside of MSDW with rapid-fire question-and-answer service.

One problem they have with Perl is CPAN. First, there are serious legal issues for MSDW in using CPAN. Second, a company with as large and critical a codebase as MSDW cannot afford to use public modules whose API can change on a whim, (e.g., the much-touted Date::Manip has changed its API 4-5 times) or where the support is limited to the email address of someone in a completely different timezone with limited ability to respond.

There is much to be said for knowing that you can call up someone between the hours of 9 and 5 and get immediate help for whatever problem you may have with the language you are using.