In environments like the one that you're describing my main reason for preferring Perl over Python is that typically more people are already basically familiar with Perl. If you want someone to start programming full time then Python is a good choice, but people who just want to automate a small piece of their daily work or move some simple shell scripts into something slightly more advanced usually can make faster progress with Perl.

One of the reasons behind that I think is that Perl is closer to C. So in companies where the main code base is C that is a big plus point for Perl.

That's just my opinion, though, maybe in other organisations that looks completely different.