Can this seemingly simple thing be done using pure-perl? I know Perl favors text crunching rather than binary crunching.

Well there is nothing technically preventing somebody writing a pure perl program to do this. However AFAIK nobody has done. So - effectively your answer here is "no".

Do I need to hire someone to do this?

Possibly. Depending how much time you want to invest/waste you might want to poke around doing the installation yourself ;-)

Would I be better off looking at an approach using PHP, Ruby or Python?

I don't know enough about the built in functionality of PHP to comment. Both Python and Ruby give you the same sort of problems Perl would.

Am I missing something obvious?

I don't think so.