The first question that came to my mind is that what are the performance requirements? I've done several phone data collection programs with Perl when the performance is not critical (ie. not real-time or near real-time).

The second question is how much binary stuff is involved? If there is a lot of binary handling of data, Perl propably wouldn't be my first choice.

On the other hand you could have a prototype done in Perl really fast, so it could advocate Perl further in your company :-) Anyway, the tool chosen for the task has to meet the task's requirements.