I would see if you can get any information from The Grant Street Group. They are always advertising on http://jobs.perl.org/ and appear to be a major player in the financial area.

From personal experience I can tell you that Rent.com is a major Perl shop, as is Hostgator, Bluehost and cPanel.

Update: I left Booking.com off the list of known major Perl players. I have not worked for them personally, but have seen their help-wanted ads and have heard from several colleagues that they, along with cPanel, are a major force behind the Houston PM group. Although not directly involved in the financial arena, you can bet that they are heavily involved with online transaction handling.

Regarding Booking.com: There's millions of lines of Perl, powering pretty much all of the company, whether internal tools or customer facing. How's that working for the company? Check out the stock price and market cap. (In case that link doesn't work for you, go to finance.google.com or similar and search for PCLN.)

If your large bank is using IBM Tivoli for monitoring, and many of them do, odds on they will already be using Perl there. Many other monitoring tools make extensive use of Perl too. Have a word with the monitoring team, they may already have dispensation in place to use Perl, or they can weigh in on your side. I work in that area and know a large number of banks around the world are relying on Perl for customised monitoring of critical live systems.

Cheers,
R.

I will look into it, thanks

Well, when I worked for Barclays Capital a few years ago, there was a lot of Perl ... mostly inherited from Lehman ... but how to make all those internal data import and massage programs into "verifiable, contactable references". The project I worked on was called ESM (Enterprise Security(or something) Master ... it was a system that imported data about securities from Bloomberg, stock exchanges, regulators and god only knows what other sources, merged and crosslinked them and provided the data to other internal systems. Part of that was Perl, part Java.

Heh, I was recently hired as a Perl expert by the same enterprise to work on a completely different system (also a Lehman legacy).
لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

python at least has something. I cannot find any equivalent for Perl.

LOL

from memory (the other day ) Builtinperl: A showcase of Perl-based startups & the cool stuff they build.

The searching businesses using perl -> Los Angeles Companies using Perl
-> Who uses Perl?

Read more... (1277 Bytes)

The O'Reilly list was great 10 years ago, but now looks more like evidence Perl has fallen into disuse.

I would contact the perlfoundation.org, compiling a list of verifiable whositswhatsits sounds right up their alley ... maybe :)

companies using perl -> Get Yourself In The Perl Companies Database | Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer [blogs.perl.org]

the database has already been seeded with information extracted from several years of job postings

https://github.com/vmbrasseur/Perl_Companies

companies using perl

http://www.quora.com/Perl/Which-French-companies-are-using-the-Perl-language

Perl Gems: Companies That Use Perl

London.pm: Perl Advocacy - Companies who use Perl within London.

And since I'm becoming the Devil's advocate's problem child, I'll keep it rolling: high level languages being equal in power (if not in readymade resources), Python shouldn't even be considered; according to Coverity, it's got twice the defect density of Perl (Re: In Defense of Perl). I Doubt any would willingly risk that Fear and Uncertainty!

Hi,

Don't forget to get the client's business side involved.

If the system has worked well for year, and is still doing so, they may feel there is no business case for spending large amounts of money, that will eventually come out of their Xmas bonus, on developing a replacement in another language.

J.C.

That is very much in play, we are counting on their support for exactly that reason.

It may be worth noting to the ADC how much Perl has evolved in the last 15 years. Perceptions based on out-of-date opinion of what some friend of a friend thinks Perl is what will kill you. Knock that on the head as soon as you can.

I would suggest probing carefully, but diplomatically, to better understand what sort of criteria the client’s Architectural Council would be using to make their decision.   I would presume, as should you, that the council is quite aware of the Perl language (and that it works well) ... so, when they ask for a “business” case that Perl is “suitable,” I would endeavor to better understand what other technologies they are using right now, how they deploy software assets (and to what machines), what interoperability is required, and, well, “does it hurt / where does it hurt” right now.   Adding any new software development technology to “the mix” is always risky and costly.   You don’t need to proselytize for the Perl language.   Rather, you need to present a business case, within the specific business context of this client, that, for this client, there is:   a business benefit; acceptable business risk; return on investment (ROI); and a truly compelling reason to add something new, instead of doing the work with the existing tools already in use there.   Leave the pom-poms at home.

Assuming the Architectural Council knows more about programming languages than what they've read in a business magazine (that is they've heard of Java) is at best naive.

Besides in this case it's not adding something new, but rather keeping things that work.

Jenda
Enoch was right!
Enjoy the last years of Rome.

I will gladly take that chance.   Any group of people in that role in a “big-boy pants” IT organization ought to be presumed to be very familiar with everything that’s out there ... including Perl.   This language is not exactly “new,” and its reputation is well known.   That’s not the argument you need to make.