I feel kind of lame promoting my own module, but this is what that would look like with RPC::Lite, following the same sort of structure. It's not too much shorter, but it's far more concise and less prone to errors from using the lower-level calls yourself. This example would get a few lines shorter with some of the improvements I have in mind for the API (client construction and response pumping stuff). Note that this code is tested and working.

use RPC::Lite::Client;

our @clients;
our @server_info;

sub setup {
  foreach my $info (@server_info) {
    push @clients, RPC::Lite::Client->new({
      Transport  => "TCP:Host=$info->{host},Port=$info->{port}",
      # default serializer is JSON, and XML is also available
    });
  }
}

sub query {
  my ($what) = @_;
  my ($responses, $result);

  # anon sub will be called with any responses from the server
  foreach my $client (@clients) {
    $client->AsyncRequest( sub { $responses++; $result += $_[0] },
                           'getCount', $what );
  }
  # The API should support aggregating multiple clients so you can
  # replace the inner foreach with one call, but it doesn't yet.
  while ($responses < @clients) {
    foreach my $client (@clients) {
      $client->HandleResponse; # pump server for data
    }
  }

  return $result;
}
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