UPDATE: I ended up using the text split function to accomplish this. Here's the code at this point, which updates a handful of descriptions on the CUCM in about 1 second!

#!/usr/bin/perl                                                       
+          

use SOAP::Lite;

my $cucmip = "192.168.10.30"; #Home Lab
my $axl_port = "8443";
my $user = "PerlAXL";
my $password = "Pa$$word";
my $axltoolkit = "AXLAPI.wsdl";

$start=time();

BEGIN {
    sub SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Client::get_basic_credentials {
return ($user => $password)
    };
}

my $cm = new SOAP::Lite
    encodingStyle => '',
    uri => "$axltoolkit",
    proxy => "https://$cucmip:$axl_port/axl/" ;

open (FILE, 'CUCM.txt');
while (<FILE>){
    chomp;
    ($name, $description) = split ("\t");
{
my $res =
  $cm->updatePhone(
         SOAP::Data->name('name' => "$name"),
         SOAP::Data->name('lines' => SOAP::Data->name('line' => SOAP::
+Data->name('index' => '1'),
                                                                 SOAP:
+:Data->name('description' => "$description")
                                                      )
                          )                 
    );

unless ($res->fault) {
}
else {
        print join ', ',
        $res->faultcode,
        $res->faultstring;
}}}
close (FILE);

$end = time();

print "That took Perl ", ($end - $start), " second(s) to update\n";

exit;
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Thanks,